How can we strengthen our laws.to have severely mentally ill in the District committed?
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Anonymous
| Basically, we as a society don't GAF about the poor, drug addicted, and mentally ill, until they make us sit up and take notice in horrible events like murder. Then we try to impose top-down solutions ("just put them in jail forever!" "send them back to their home states!") which are unrealistic, ineffective, and would corrode civil liberties. |
Anonymous
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OP, while life with untreated, severe mental illness is difficult, treating a mental illness is also difficult. Mood stabilizers can be toxic to major organs, like the kidneys. Many people do not feel physically or mentally well when they are medicated. They experience nausea, fatigue, weight gain, tremors, and other side effects. ECT is still one of the more effective last-line treatments we have for treatment-resistant depression, and it can permanently effect memory. People with treated severe mental illness can still qualify as disabled because their medication side effects and/or because their treatments are not entirely effective.
So, just as accepting any other medical treatment is a choice, accepting mental healthcare is a choice unless you are a threat to yourself or others. We define that threat in specific, short-term ways to avoid unnecessary institutionalizing the non-criminally ill. One is permitted to be homeless and/or jobless. One is permitted to damage relationships with their family members. These are difficult choices that are not easy to see, but they are options available to adults. As a society we also have a history of violating the civil rights of the mentally ill. Through the 20th century we incarcerated people in psych wards where their conditions often deteriorated instead of improving. More than a few people who were confined against their wills were sent away because they were inconvenient to their families or deemed aberrant in one way in another, not because they had diagnoses that merited being institutionalized. The solution to this problem was legal reforms to make it very hard to repeat this pattern. If you would really like to help people, push for more research into effective treatments for significantly impairing mental illnesses. Then push for affordable healthcare for all so that everyone is able to access medication and therapy regardless of their wealth and employment status. |
Anonymous
Ahem, the Democrats controlled the US House of Representatives in 1981. 272 Dems to 159 Republicans. I looked at that link and it is heavily partisan. And a law that was repealed a year after it was passed means it had no real impact on the mental health situation at the time. What the repeal of the law did not do was repealing the Patient's Bill of Rights, which remained in place. The ACLU was heavily involved in promoting civil rights for the mentally ill throughout the 60s and 70s. There was a big push to close down the institutional state mental institutions and replace them with smaller group homes for a variety of reasons, most of which were sincere but ultimately not successful or effective, because a large part of the problem aren't the people who are seriously mentally ill but the more moderately mentally ill who can rapidly or suddenly turn violent when provoked or under the influence of drugs. It's also why the original premise of community based health centers promoted by the MHSA never really worked out because on a low level these centers were wholly incapable of tracking the mentally ill who drift in and out of group housing depending on the degree of their drug abuses. They couldn't, by law, restrain the moderately mentally ill who would have benefited the most from being institutionalized and under a regime. The centers were also places that couldn't allow drugs, and the mentally ill were dependent on drugs. |
Anonymous
Well this guy spent his day picking through trash, knocking sandiwches out of peoples hands and ended up with his head bashed in. His family could never catch up with him through the system, and with current laws had they tried to help them they wouldnt have been able to and would have been called authoritarian...do you think his days on earth since his slide into severe mental illness and inability to help himself were happy ones? |
Anonymous
Yet they cant take care of themselves. They lie wrapped in multiple hot blankets in the summer on the sidewalks, they rant and rave, they stab passersby to death, they get their heads bashed in. How is out city helping? What laws need to be changed to help people who cant help themselves? |
Anonymous
The reason I suggested home state is that DC attracts a high proportion foschizoid. Their home states may be better equipped to care for them and they may be nearer to family. We certainly dont do sh* for them. What's your solution?. |
Anonymous
If you read the thread you'd realize it's a civil rights issue as well as a mental issue. We could probably make headway if we decided the mentally ill didn't deserve or qualify for civil rights. It would make things much easier, in a way. But we don't do that in America. |
Anonymous
You're not being kind, in any way, to step over or hand a sandwich to someone rotting on the side walk in deep mentally dissonant funk. That is NOT civil rights. Would you leave an Alzheimer's patient to wander the fields, or issue an alert? The pendulum has swung way to far to 'rights', when a balance is required. People are dying. Not just the mentally ill, but also the people they lash out at in their hallucinatory, incapacited state. |
Anonymous
| It's not that we need to have them committed -- it's that we have to pay for them. When Reagan was elected president, the streets became flooded with the mentally ill that society no longer wanted to pay for. You can thank Ronald Regan for ruining our society by pretending that NOT caring about others was a virtue rather than the other way around. |
Anonymous
What the heck is foschizoid? I'm local and never heard of it.... |
Anonymous
Why don’t we have actual mental health facilities?? |
Anonymous
Yes why? We have mental illness, but no facilities? |
Anonymous
You know Reagan hasn't been president since 1988? 31 years ago? The rise of homeless in the 1970s and 1980s is directly linked to the explosion of hardcore drug usage in the United States, starting in the 1970s, which was exacerbated by the closing of the state mental institutions (at the demands of the liberals and the ACLU who wanted them replaced with group homes). The vast majority of the homeless have substantial drug abuse problems, which is usually why they are homeless and which is why the group home model was an utter failure. I'm not sure how the problem can be effectively addressed. In 19th century America there was a national problem with vagrancy too, but the drug abuse of the time was alcohol (it was one of the major motivations behind the Prohibition, which few people know these days). I don't think most of us are unsympathetic to the plight of the homeless, but we are probably sensible enough to know that giving them money will only go directly to the drugs/alcohol, and it's difficult to institutionalize people against their will due to the civil rights laws. What to do? |
Anonymous
There are mental health facilities. Both public and private. I'm not sure why people are claiming there aren't any. |
Anonymous
So if a homeless, addicted person with schizophrenia decided one day that they wanted treatment and medication, they could go somewhere and get treatment? |