re: President Trump floats reopening insane asylums

quote:

---

Good luck, I guess. They all closed after people began suing the government for providing substandard service… so every government agency decided to stop offering any services at all.

---

While there were places which were poorly run, a lot of it was due to the mob mentality of believing they were all bad. Along with that there was a 1-2 combo of legislation from Kennedy's Community Mental Health Act of 1963 (the goal of which was to create community mental health centers (CMHCs) to replace asylums, but the program failed due to being only half-arse funded) and the passage of Medicaid (which included the Institution for Mental Disease (IMD) exclusion, which prohibited federal funding for long-term care in psychiatric hospitals for patients aged 22–64). These two passages changed the way institutions operated and gutted funding.

All that said, the substandard service was better for society as a whole. Today, with omni-present recording devices such a system would likely still be better for many of the severely mentally ill than leaving them on their own to spend their lives shooting up under bridges.

While we desperately need more psychiatric beds. In 1955, there were something like 550k psychiatric beds. In 2016, that number had decreased to 37k for the whole nation. That's an insane fall.

We have the need, but I'm very skeptical about getting the appropriate funding.

quote:

---

This is the way... not just to get them off the street for our own convenience, but also that they may receive steady treatment and live the best life they can.

---

As a society, this is the compassionate thing to do. If we could just get welfare fraud under control, we could fund housing and treatment centers for the mentally ill who are presently living in the streets and causing mayhem.

Should absolutely be done

Deinstiutionalization is a huge reason for the current homelessness crisis.

MLGA -Make Lobotomies Great Again!

quote:

---

They need to be reopened, but it will cost a boatload of money.

---

Yes they do and yes it will. Like whatever is eventually saved in government entitlements once Trump is done this would add that back and then some. But the benefit would be worth it and creates a lot of jobs. Monitoring capabilities are so much more advanced than they used to be so the potential for abuse would be lessened. That was a big problem in the old system. Regulation would be even more insane and costly. I doubt there’s any way around that.

They didn’t close them all they were rebranded

Another outstanding idea

Long term supportive housing still exists on a very limited and fractured level. There’s a guy I know who has a few felony convictions stemming from a psychotic break he had. He’s since been diagnosed with schizophrenia (with accompanying auditory hallucinations). Somehow, he was able to qualify for long term supportive housing and found a placement. He’s so stable now. He went from never showering, taking his meds intermittently and smoking cigarettes he found on the sidewalk to holding down a job and being a productive member of society.