When it comes to Red Flag orders and laws against felons carrying firearms, it’s often said that if a person can’t be trusted with a gun, they can’t be trusted without a custodian. That’s driven home when you hear about the guy in Nashville who has been arrested over 200 times in the last 5 years, but has been released every time without charges. Why? He isn’t competent to stand trial.
He’s known to steal hundreds of dollars of merchandise and services at a time. In all, he has cost Nashville area businesses tens of thousands of dollars. It’s only a matter of time before he injures or kills someone. It’s the mental health version of “diplomatic immunity.” There are some businesses where he has eaten 4 or 5 times and refused to pay. (Although why wouldn’t you trespass the guy after the first or second time?) There are more than 200 people in Nashville alone who are in the same exact situation. They offend over and over again, only to be released to do it again. It happens all over the country- most of the nation’s homeless are people with substance abuse and mental health problems.
Asylums were once used to house these individuals, but the system was abused by towns and families that wanted to avoid taking care of people who were incapable of caring for themselves by redefining what was then termed “senility” as a psychiatric problem and sending these men and women to state-supported asylums.
When I was running calls as a street medic, I was on a first name basis with dozens of homeless people who had all sorts of mental health issues. Even this week in the ED, I had a patient that was combative with mental health and substance abuse issues. We had to put her in 4 point restraints and a waist belt and then drug her with Haldol and Ativan. She will be discharged within a day or two, and then we will see her back at the ED in a couple of days or a week, wash, rinse, repeat.
Today, only a small number of the old psychiatric hospitals exist. Psychiatric care and treatment are now delivered through a host of services including crisis services, short-term and general-hospital-based acute psychiatric care units, and outpatient services ranging from twenty-four-hour assisted living environments to clinics and clinicians’ offices offering a range of psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments. Untold thousands of people with mental health issues fall through the cracks and wind up homeless, in jail, or simply wandering around, a drain on society.
The quality and availability of these outpatient services vary widely, making me wonder if “asylums,” in the true sense of the word, aren’t the best way to handle this. The issue here is that I don’t trust the powers that be to avoid doing what they did before- simply redefine things as being “mental illness” and using the asylum to lock people away for opposing climate change, trannies, or something else that they want to use as a cudgel.
18 Comments
nones · July 7, 2023 at 5:42 am
What this guy needs is a tune up or as ERJ calls it, a “hickory shampoo”. Reapply as necessary. But don’t get caught, while he is not competent to stand trial, you are…
Don Curton · July 7, 2023 at 6:53 am
Had a family member (actually wife’s family) who was a life-long drug addict. Toward the end, in his 60’s, started to really lose touch with the reality. He was never than mentally stable, but got to the point he really couldn’t live by himself. Tried to get him into some place, damn near impossible. There just really aren’t any good options.
And the obvious answer, bring asylums back, has the obvious problem – us deplorables would obviously be the natural target for the state looking to lock people up. Social credit score too low? Asylum. Didn’t repost pride month propaganda? Asylum. Went to MAGA rally? Asylum. Drug addict living on the street, talking to imaginary people and masturbating at random pedestrians? That’s his choice, man, who are we to judge!
Fucking clown world.
SiG · July 7, 2023 at 6:53 am
Asylums are too expensive. No city/state/whatever has the money to put all of those people away, so they end up transfering the costs to everyone else. Everything we buy is more expensive to help cover the losses the stores suffer. Every service is more expensive for the same basic reason.
Bronx & Brooklyn · July 7, 2023 at 8:43 am
Most of the increase in “homelessness” dates to 1972 when a judge (Sullivan iirc) in New York State ruled that most mental hospital patients couldn’t be held against their will, and had to be released. His ruling demanded that NY State set up community based inpatient or outpatient facilities everywhere, but that was never done, partially because of the early 1970s “fiscal crisis”. (do you remember the NY Daily News headline “Ford to NY .. Drop Dead” ? ).
That lawsuit & ruling was a response to Geraldo Rivera’s expose of the horrific conditions at Willowbrook State Mental Hospital (on Staten Island NYC … closed up a few years later .. the abandoned buildings are still there). That expose was Geraldo Rivera’s first big story, the one that propelled him to fame and glory.
When I travelled the subways in the early seventies, I would always see a few homeless, and only at the stations in Manhattan. After that court ruling, there was an immediate uptick in the number of homeless living on the subway, easily two or three times as many. As the years progressed, you would see them not only in manhattan, but in the outer boroughs as well, fequently wandering aboveground in what used to be nicer neighborhoods.
Patton Was Right · July 7, 2023 at 8:53 am
This is one more example of easy to account for costs versus difficult to account for costs.
It is easy to look at the cost of incarcerating somebody or having them safely in a mental asylum and figure out a cost per person per year. Let them all go, and you’re saving all this money, right?
The problem is the cost to civilization from having these people out and about is dispersed and not easy to account for.
There is first the direct cost of things that they steal and destroy, then you have the cost of security measures to try to prevent that, the cost of insurance which is higher than it should be if you didn’t have these people around, then you have the intangibles like the loss of the ability to enjoy public spaces due to nut cases and the loss of the feeling of security in homes and the cost of medicating these people in emergency departments and the cost of housing them in jail houses throughout the land. I’m sure you can think of more costs that can get attached.
The problem is that it’s easy to look at the cost of the asylum and decide that it’s too expensive but I would be willing to bet if you could actually account for all of the dispersed expenses these people cost society, it is WAY cheaper to keep them locked up and it also promotes the cause of civilization. It is also more humane to the nut jobs than letting them slowly kill themselves through substance abuse and doing other stupid things.
I do understand the concern about giving the state the power to institutionalize people. It has been abused in the past in the US,, and the Soviet Union abused it considerably just as other commenters have suggested it could be abused. That being said, the system that exists right now is not sustainable forever, in addition to just flat out not working.
Grumpy51 · July 7, 2023 at 9:44 am
We have asylums in TX…… but here they’re called prisons and jails….. NOT the solution, the can was just punted to another segment/location.
Grumpy57 · July 8, 2023 at 7:59 am
The problem in TX – when a facility was built (early 1900s), it was built for a certain load (population number). This was quickly exceeded by the courts with judges ordering the facilities to take more.
So the judges fooked everyone – the current residents/patients, the staff, the new residents/patients, the system. STOP the judges from “court-ordering” the overload would go a LONG way to helping, and would give a better idea of the numbers involved.
Craig · July 7, 2023 at 10:06 am
Reagan closed the looney bins in CA when he was governor. Mental health is a major issue, but having govt. run asylum is scarier than homeless problems. Could have a vagrant/homeless round up put them in a large camp give them food drugs(from evidence storage).
Gerry · July 7, 2023 at 10:25 am
Philly had the Byberry State Hospital that handles mental and addictive problems for century or so. Gov. Thornburg’s wife worked to shut it down because it was cruel way the warehouse those folks as well as the severely retarded, The Governor made the same economic argument that it was cheaper to establish group homes and to provide some basic education or technical training.
This was true for 90% of the residents. It was a complete failure for the last 10% and removed the needed custodial supervision that was required.
I remember seeing former patients of the facility wandering around the facility kong after it was closed . It was the only safe place they knew.
I volunteer at the local Salvation Army in the kitchen. About 10-15% of the folks who eat there are hard core junkies. The biggest percentage , maybe 80% are battling some kind of mental or emotional problem. They can rarely be trusted hold a job or to take their meds and frequently end up misdemeanor stupid and get jail time in the county lockup.
These folks really need to be instutionalized.
Gryphon · July 7, 2023 at 1:31 pm
Unless “Involuntary Commitment to a Mental Facility” can ONLY be Imposed on someone after being Convicted by a Jury of “Guilty of (insert crime) but Insane” the “Mental Health Establishment WILL be used against ‘Opponents of the Regime’. Exactly like the judeo-bolsheviks in the ‘Soviet Union’ did for Decades. Like all the rest of the ‘communist’ crap we are seeing now, Same ‘people’, Same results.
joe · July 7, 2023 at 6:50 pm
white warranted a guy once and he beat me back to my car with sandwich in one hand and juice box in the other asking me for a ride back to town…that’s the state of our “mental health” system…
Noway2 · July 8, 2023 at 8:47 am
Much of what was said above it true. I have family members that used to work at an MRDD facility, i.e. group homes and sheltered industries. Many of the residents had been at an asylum that had been shut down because of deplorable conditions and abuse by staff, a lot of it sexual and rape. It’s a tough question with no hood options, many of which are expensive. Whose going to pay for it? Are you willing to pay more taxes to upkeep a non productive portion of society? Then there is the moral side that will say they’re people with rights and many of whom enjoy their lives. The families, often times, can provide the necessary upkeep, especially as parents age. I hate to say it, but the best and most humane option might be to treat them as they would have in earlier society and euthanize them.
Robert · July 8, 2023 at 10:41 am
I do not believe there is any “best way” or even any “good way” to handle the problem of homeless people.
Asylum programs are very expensive to run and inevitably deteriorate into abusive treatment of the inmates unless carefully supervised. That is why they were discontinued in the first place. Public officials do not want to spend the money. Actual voters do not want to spend the money. So, we got a lot of wishful thinking about cheaper outpatient treatment and pharmaceutical solutions. Which do work for some people. Not for others.
And as other posters have noted, we cannot trust the government with any program of involuntary confinement for the mentally ill. The temptation to classify political opponents as “mentally ill” would be irresistible and inevitable with the current regime.
“Oppositional Defiance Disorder” has a nice ring to it. Or “Sluggish Schizophrenia”. Or “Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist”. It’s all been done before.
Divemedic · July 8, 2023 at 11:49 am
While I would agree that there is a significant risk in asylums being used as political weapons, and would also agree that there is no “good” way to deal with mental health, there are “worse” and “better” ways, and the current method of letting them wander the streets as homeless grifters who are criminals that are drug addicts because they are attempting to self medicate is definitely “worse” than the asylums that we had just a few decades ago.
Yesterday in the ED, I had five different homeless drug addicts as patients. Three of them had been in the ED at least 4 times in the past month for similar complaints. What we are doing now is not only failing to work, but is expensive in terms of direct, indirect, and societal costs.
Skeptic · July 8, 2023 at 2:56 pm
14 comments and nobody has mentioned the obvious. He’s black. I would venture to say that if he were white, he wouldn’t have been able to rack up 200 arrests in four years without being incarcerated, all other things being equal. Someone above asked why restaurants don’t just trespass him. Well, that would be rayciss. And whoever did it would find themselves fired and the restaurant boycotted by the savages.
At some point, we are going to have to start dealing honestly as a society with a lot of problems – race and the insane among them.
Elrod · July 8, 2023 at 3:39 pm
Should social conditions continue to parallel the economic decline – they are inextricably linked so it’s a given that they will get worse – a solution will be implemented, almost certainly on the individual level. That solution will be worse, at least for those requiring 24X7X365 supervision, than the prospect of even middling institutional care provided by an incompetent and underfunded local government.
It will, however, be quite a bit better for everyone else.
Damn shame it has to be that way, but welcome to America.
BobF · July 8, 2023 at 4:15 pm
On the way back from a trip today we stopped at Walgreens to pick up a prescription near home. The wife went in and I sat in the car. 50 feet from me was a woman in decent, clean, properly fitting clothes. She was talking to a trash can for a full ten minutes. Numerous people passed her within arms reach, some closer; she did not speak to any of them as they passed, totally ignoring her, though they could hardly fail to notice her behavior. To them she was invisible, her behavior not worthy of notice as being abnormal.
She then sat down with her back to the wall, took out a lighter, a pack of cigarettes, and began to smoke; the conversation with the trash can had ceased. She was still there smoking that cigarette, bothering nobody, when we left.
Now, she obviously needs help, but she bothers nobody. To me she is less bothersome than the increasing number of panhandlers walking between cars at intersections.
Seems to me she has money for cigarettes, she does not seem to be malnourished, has money for cigarettes and funds and ability for personal hygiene. I assume she is getting a check from some source, must cash that check, and therefore must have an ID. I’d bet she is not homeless — wonder where she lives and what that place is like. Discounting the number of those who ARE bothersome, I’d bet there are large numbers of her “type.” Seems she COULD get help, but how? What is the first step and what is the end game now that we have long ago largely dismantled the system?
TRX · July 11, 2023 at 4:52 pm
> I don’t trust the powers that be to avoid doing what they did before
—
They were really fond of lobotomies to make “troublesome” patients easier to manage. It became less popular in the 1960s, and is supposedly rare nowadays.
Like nursing homes, most asylums were just warehouses, operated at the lowest possible cost.
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