Did insane asylums reduce in number at some point? (inability, parent, people)

[jencam]

Originally Posted by RbccL

Exactly. Not very well thought out at all...hard to imagine this great idea without specifics of how will it be continually paid for? It still isn't properly funded, and I can't imagine this conundrum improving. It costs substantially more to care, and have programs and plans for each individually.

I don't know what is confusing to you. My mother had bipolar disorder and her income qualified her to see a psychiatrist once a month, get her medicine, etc. When she got Medicare and could see a private Dr., she declined to. She liked the one she had. Medicare started paying MHMR instead of wherever they usually get paid from.

This system was designed for people who need medication and other therapy, but don't need to be locked up and have it forced on them. They want care, or their families insist, or a court order insists, etc.

I understand the other end very well. I saw a docu about a woman who starved herself to death because her paranoia was such that she thought demons would get her if she left the house.

She needed forced medication, or at least to be in a restricted environment. Or did she? I'm actually not sure. Depends on how you look at it.

The hospital had been so hellish for her she would rather die an agonizing death than go back. There is no way to know if forced medication would have done her any good, since at that time they couldn't get a court order to force it while she was in.

Maybe they still can't do that in her state, IDK, but in Texas they can. More need to be opened back up, that is serious. Texas is having a crisis with the massive influx of new people in our state but no expansion of hospitals.

I'm just saying that community based care works for millions of people.

It allows people to fully function in society. Move up. There is job training and anything you can think of to help people get stable on medication and/or therapy, get careers, all the things. We should pay for them to languish in hospitals instead? How is that cheaper, if money is the concern?

[Crazy-Cat-Lady]

Originally Posted by jencam

I don't know what is confusing to you. My mother had bipolar disorder and her income qualified her to see a psychiatrist once a month, get her medicine, etc. When she got Medicare and could see a private Dr., she declined to. She liked the one she had. Medicare started paying MHMR instead of wherever they usually get paid from.

This system was designed for people who need medication and other therapy, but don't need to be locked up and have it forced on them. They want care, or their families insist, or a court order insists, etc.

I understand the other end very well. I saw a docu about a woman who starved herself to death because her paranoia was such that she thought demons would get her if she left the house.

She needed forced medication, or at least to be in a restricted environment. Or did she? I'm actually not sure. Depends on how you look at it.

The hospital had been so hellish for her she would rather die an agonizing death than go back. There is no way to know if forced medication would have done her any good, since at that time they couldn't get a court order to force it while she was in.

Maybe they still can't do that in her state, IDK, but in Texas they can. More need to be opened back up, that is serious. Texas is having a crisis with the massive influx of new people in our state but no expansion of hospitals.

I'm just saying that community based care works for millions of people.

It allows people to fully function in society. Move up. There is job training and anything you can think of to help people get stable on medication and/or therapy, get careers, all the things. We should pay for them to languish in hospitals instead? How is that cheaper, if money is the concern?

A lot of us can't function though . Community based care requires there to be an actual community, when in 2019 such things are few and far between in our self absorbed society where people do not care or feel they have no time to

[happygrrrl]

Reagan started it when he was still governor of California. Institutionalized patients, some who had spent their whole lives in state hospitals (the pc term) were turned into the streets. They were supposed to live in “group homes”, or “board and care facilities”, and get their meds and therapy from “community clinics”, paid for by taxpayers, but supposedly cheaper, and “less restrictive” than state hospitals. The trouble was that those “community services” never materialized. Other states took note of the savings and followed suit.

State hospitals, admittedly, did not always provide the best, most humane care. I once turned down a job in one, knowing that I couldn’t go to work every day in that environment. But overall, they were better than the hellish mess that this country now finds itself in. My sister had a good friend, a wonderful lady, who was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. She was in and out of a state hospital in SoCal, but she had a mostly stable life. If she had to live like the mentally ill do today, on the street with no help, she would have died a horrible, early death. Thanks, Reagan.

[Crazy-Cat-Lady]

Originally Posted by happygrrrl

Reagan started it when he was still governor of California. Institutionalized patients, some who had spent their whole lives in state hospitals (the pc term) were turned into the streets. They were supposed to live in “group homes”, or “board and care facilities”, and get their meds and therapy from “community clinics”, paid for by taxpayers, but supposedly cheaper, and “less restrictive” than state hospitals. The trouble was that those “community services” never materialized. Other states took note of the savings and followed suit.

State hospitals, admittedly, did not always provide the best, most humane care. I once turned down a job in one, knowing that I couldn’t go to work every day in that environment. But overall, they were better than the hellish mess that this country now finds itself in. My sister had a good friend, a wonderful lady, who was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. She was in and out of a state hospital in SoCal, but she had a mostly stable life. If she had to live like the mentally ill do today, on the street with no help, she would have died a horrible, early death. Thanks, Reagan.

For all our so-called advances, this is an awful era to be mentally ill or to have a developmental disorder. I despair

[RbccL]

Originally Posted by jencam

I don't know what is confusing to you. My mother had bipolar disorder and her income qualified her to see a psychiatrist once a month, get her medicine, etc. When she got Medicare and could see a private Dr., she declined to. She liked the one she had. Medicare started paying MHMR instead of wherever they usually get paid from.

I’m not confused, I know there is not enough money to support this successfully. I didn’t just watch a documentary, I was there, with my coworkers, silently watching the last election and thinking we would soon see even less funding for those “being assimilated into the community”. If you think the criminally insane shouldn’t “languish” in a state hospital, you have no experience with them. Your mother may not have been committed against her will. We’re discussing insane asylums, not a trip to the Dr. for meds.

[Lodestar]

Please. It's not an issue of blame. Mental illness affects all of us. Because President Kennedy was assassinated his project went untended until President Regan finally implemented it. There was no malice intended. Some changes definitely needed to be made.

Kennedy had an invested interested in better care for the mentally ill due to the problems of his sister Rose. (That's an interesting story by itself suggesting that the powerful and controlling father Kennedy had the carefree and headstrong girl lobotomized because he found her difficult to handle. In the process it damaged her sufficiently to require full time care.)

I too saw the old-style institutions and worked in them during the seventies and eighties when the changes began to be made. Actually MN does a pretty good job of managing a more community-oriented concept of care. The main problem is that of funding and that falls on both parties and the people. We give lip service but our funding is skewed. Part of the problem is that so few Legislators understand mental illness well enough to comprehend what exactly is needed. We spend a lot on appearance/facility and not enough on human resources.

Another huge part of the problem is the issue of human rights often giving those who are uncapable of reasoning the full rights of a sane human and thus allowing him to make choices which are bad for him and society. This is a serious and challenging issue. Decisions are very difficult to make in this case even though human reason suggests the logical, simple method of locking people up and forcing medication until they are thinking more clearly. It's much more complicated than that in actuality.

If the Democrats were the only ones with good ideas and who cared, given the dominance of Democrats in government since Regan, we would have had this problem solved by now it seems. So lets be fair about blame.

Neither political party ever allots enough money to carry the program to a successful fruition if there is even such a thing in the case of mental illness. The amount would be unending. It's not a solvable problem, only one with various improvements and often individualized.

[Roboteer]

Originally Posted by nobodysbusiness

It happened in the 70's in California when Reagan was governor. He closed the hospitals and turned the people out on the street. The theory was that churches would step in and provide care. Then the ACLU got involved and fought for the rights of mentally ill people not to be locked up. And there you have it.

It used to be that a citizen could petition a court to have someone committed to a mental institution, and the court could grant such committment if enough valid evidence was presented.

This changed in the 1960s and 70s.

In 1967 two Democrats and a Republican in California's state legislature came up with the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, designed to end INVOLUNTARY commitments of mentally ill, alcoholic, etc. people into large mental institutions. The LPS Act was hailed by liberals all over the country as putting an end to eeevil government practices of dictating to helpless victims where they would go and what treatments they would get whether they liked it or not. It was overwhelmingly passed by California's Assembly and Senate, and finally signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967. Similar laws were quickly passed all over the country, advocated mostly by liberal groups and do-gooders.

The liberal ACLU kept pushing this agenda to get these patients out of mental institutions, and finally resulted in 1975 (coincidentally Reagan's last year as Governor) in the U.S. Supreme Court handing down a decision in O'Connor vs. Donaldson (422 US 563). This Court decision announced a new Constitutional right: The mentally ill could not be forced to stay in such institutions if they were not an actual threat to others. This opened the floodgates and let huge numbers of patients, in various degrees of helplessness, out of the institutions.

When it was discovered that these laws and court decisions had the effect of putting many people who could not, in fact, take care of themselves out on the street, the liberals did a fast 180, hastily forgot about their long, enthusiastic nationwide advocacy and support of the agenda, and invented a completely new accusation: That it was Ronald Reagan alone who had "kicked all those poor people out of their nice, safe hospitals and made them homeless".

And there you have it.

From Wikipedia:

The Lanterman–Petris–Short (LPS) Act (Cal. Welf & Inst. Code, sec. 5000 et seq.) concerns the involuntary civil commitment to a mental health institution in the State of California. The act set the precedent for modern mental health commitment procedures in the United States. It was co-authored by California State Assemblyman Frank Lanterman (R) and California State Senators Nicholas C. Petris (D) and Alan Short (D), and signed into law in 1967 by Governor Ronald Reagan. The Act went into full effect on July 1, 1972. It cited seven articles of intent:

•To end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of mentally disordered persons, people with developmental disabilities, and persons impaired by chronic alcoholism, and to eliminate legal disabilities;

•To provide prompt evaluation and treatment of persons with serious mental disorders or impaired by chronic alcoholism;

•To guarantee and protect public safety;

•To safeguard individual rights through judicial review;

•To provide individualized treatment, supervision, and placement services by a conservatorship program for gravely disabled persons;

•To encourage the full use of all existing agencies, professional personnel and public funds to accomplish these objectives and to prevent duplication of services and unnecessary expenditures;

•To protect mentally disordered persons and developmentally disabled persons from criminal acts.

The Act in effect ended all hospital commitments by the judiciary system, except in the case of criminal sentencing, e.g., convicted sexual offenders, and those who were "gravely disabled", defined as unable to obtain food, clothing, or housing [Conservatorship of Susan T., 8 Cal. 4th 1005 (1994)]. It did not, however, impede the right of voluntary commitments. It expanded the evaluative power of psychiatrists and created provisions and criteria for holds.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by Hollytree

I remember when a lot were turned out on the streets because it was thought they could take the new psychiatric medications (for schizophrenia for example) and not need hospitalization. Problem was, once outside of medical supervision, they didn't take their meds. So now you see mentally ill sleeping in the streets and begging on street corners.

There were problems with some of the meds back then, too. I understand the one for schizophrenia had very unpleasant side-effects, which is why patients didn't like taking them. I've heard there's a new generation of meds available for that now, so hopefully that will help those patients get on track and stay on track.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by RbccL

Are you mentally ill? Being mentally ill in itself doesn't ban anyone from owning a gun. Being self-admitted to a psychiatric facility doesn't even prevent one from owning a gun. Having less facilities labeled as "insane asylums" doesn't lessen the amount of people being reported to the Federal government as a danger to themselves or others. People who are deemed as lacking the ability to manage or contract their own affairs can be banned from buying guns.

What is your real question/statement for this thread, OP?

Are you sure about the bolded? It probably varies from state to state. In WA State, it used to be illegal for people who had been diagnosed with certain mental illnesses to have a gun. I don't know what the current laws are.

[RbccL]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

Are you sure about the bolded? It probably varies from state to state. In WA State, it used to be illegal for people who had been diagnosed with certain mental illnesses to have a gun. I don't know what the current laws are.

The seller of the firearm does the back ground check, don't they? If no involuntary commitment has been reported, there is nothing listed on a background check.

Under federal law, 2 conditions bar one of purchasing: If he is involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, or if a court or government body declares him mentally incompetent. The court or government body that made the decision on the individual's mental health is required to report that record to a state law enforcement agency or the FBI. The records would be in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a confidential database that houses the names and birth years of individuals ineligible to buy firearms.

Many mentally ill people are going day by day, undiagnosed, not disturbing anyone. Until they are a danger or declared incompetent, there's no record of that and no reason for the seller to know the mental health of the buyer.