Tarkan wrote:Yeah, the closing of the loony bins under Reagan was one of those decisions that looks increasingly bad in hindsight.
A lot of our homeless population are mentally ill. Yeah, they are drug addicts, but a lot of them are addicts because they are self-medicating undiagnosed and untreated serious mental illness. Institutionalization would probably be better for them rather than simply tossing them out on the streets to suffer and die. This is a subject where I'm arguably a bleeding heart.
And that was adopted from Foucault, who said, without any medical training at all, that the mentally ill were just expressing themselves and needed to be free and society needed to accept them.
Which is fine but it completely forgot the original concept of Asylum being a place where people were protected from others and themselves and the rest of society was protected from them.
In the early 90s I was involved in 80s mandated de-institutionalization and I would say about 90% of the them were just locked up because that was what was advised back in the 40's, 50s, 60s and 70s. Some were really cool people too...but the 10% that shouldn't have been....man, that was rough.
I worked with one guy who was institutionalized for rape. Voice told him to rape. He'd be driven mad by them unless he raped, so he was locked up and medicated and quite content because the meds toned down the voices and his Depo toned down his hormones. Before I met him he had done so well outside the institution that he got a job, got an apartment and got a social worker visit once per week. Then he lost his job, lost his apartment and went off his meds. Minneapolis PD found him screaming on the street and did what any shitty PD would do and took him to the bus station and sent him to Madison Wisconsin. I met him after he called the Police on himself and told them he was gonna rape someone.
He shouldn't have been let out. He did not want to be let out, no one should ever want him let out, but he was let out anyway.
When the fruitcake left combines with the greedy right we get the homeless problem we have today.