Great, so I might get put in the nut house or put on some creepy registry due to my generalized anxiety, depression, and dysphoria even though I don’t own (nor want) a gun. Fuck this asshole.
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Too late: he already reproduced.
Trump never really has any grasp of the issues. He comes up with an idea and spouts it off and hasn’t put any thought into it.
In this case I am reminded that lots of mental institutions were closed down during the Reagan years, and seriously ill people were basically tossed into the streets (note how homelessness first became an issue around the same time.)
So I am all for the US taking a serious look at mental health care, but most of the shooters were seemingly sane, until they started killing people, so what Trump proposes here isn’t going to make a difference, even if we put the best possible spin on it and ignore the troubling similarity to Nazi policy.
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Fear of being institutionalized is going to set mental health care back 50 years.
Incarceration is an after the fact response not a preventative.
This will keep people who actually need help on the streets until they break, do something that could have been prevented with counseling and medication and then they get “locked up.”
What I’m not against is reintroduction of public mental health care. If we updated these facilities beyond more jails with a patina of health care this could be a turning point for people who need these services. But who am I kidding?
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That’s the problem here. When we shifted to a privatized mental health solutions, what ended up happening was that families that couldn’t take care of their mentally ill family members, because they couldn’t afford it or because they were not well-equipped, many people just ended up on the street, and then ended up in jails, which became defacto institutions. Forcing people struggling with mental illness into an institution is cruel, but if they don’t come from a family with resources to provide effective care, they end up on the streets or in jail. There has got to be public help for the mentally ill that does not stigmatize or punish them.
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I’m sure that’s a nice side effect, but I really feel like this is the next step toward a move to start jailing dissenters, and from there the 2020/21 version of the ovens. Actions without oversight go to dark places fast. Look at them arguing against providing the kids they’ve jailed with soap and adequate sleep.
Is thinking that paranoid of me? There was a time when I would have agreed. That was before they made concentration camps for kids. Before there was a huge surge of white nationalism. Before cut rate Mussolini was ushered into the White House.
They are dropping any pretext of subtlety as each new thing they do or say shows it’s not needed. Can you imagine either of the Bushes doing this when they were in charge? It’s happening now and it’s mind boggling to me that the non-wacky conservatives are going along with it, just because it’s “their guy” running things.
Who is this “we” you speak of? You have faith they will stock their institutions with competent, caring, empathetic employees? They haven’t even been able to do that with their own Cabinet.
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Why 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Trump’s never there.
What’s the address for Mar-a-Lago or his golf course in New Jersey?
New York City surprises everyone and renames that stretch of 5th Avenue for Obama which gives Trump a heart attack?
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Luckily, that just got shot down in appeals. Now it needs to be enforced.
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There’s the rub.
And I’m very glad that it got shot down. It means we might have a chance? Maybe? I just don’t know anymore.
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I talked to a British psychiatrist who believed in deinstitutionalisation in the 1960s. He thought that there were people in hospitals who could function in the outside world with support (true) and that it would be a better use of NHS funds to do this (also true).
What ended up happening was Margaret Thatcher, funding cuts and ‘Care in the Community’.
Is there a way that we can care for the mentally ill without conservatives making lives miserable? That’s the option I want.
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Right on! Me too. And they are supposedly the religiously oriented, family values parties. They don’t give a shit about families.
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I already posted it.
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The needs of mentally ill people are high and so supremely diverse that it’s honestly questionable whether they can even be served by a single “hospital” type institution. I also don’t support the kind of institutionalization that occurred in the past. Most often it was just a way to get rid of “unwanted” people without needing them to commit a crime first. Children with autism lumped in from birth with suicidal teens and those suffering from PTSD from wars… people with needs that require different types of care… none of them getting that care. My maternal grandmother was in such an institution because she was born deaf and her family was convinced by authority figures that it was the best place for her. She witnessed other children being beat to death for contracting measles among other rosy tales. She was not taught to read or write until she was taken out. She lived a full life but only because her family was able to move to a state with a school for the deaf in it. What Trump is suggesting isn’t a solution, it’s just another excuse to murder people.
The kinds of specialized centers for specific needs that would actually help, and the kind of outpatient care and assisted living facilities that people could actually use, those cost money and require a lot of skilled social workers, nurses, staff. With or without institutionalization as a concept, those are what are needed, and I reckon it’ll be a cold day in Hell when Trump or the GOP wants to invest the nation’s money in social services.
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Agreed.
Also agreed.
(spoilered - mental health warning)
I have PTSD from being on the receiving end of a campaign of far-right violence in the UK 15 years ago. My life since then has partly involved me staying capable enough that I am not detained under the mental health act, a nightmare situation for trans people as it can be used as a reason to stop hormone treatment. Most days I cope (and I have a far lower bar for coping than most people), but sometimes I end up feeling like everyone is out to kill me and I become a suicide risk. That’s when I call my friends to be on suicide watch, because there is nothing else I can do.
I have given up on getting any outpatient care at this point because there isn’t the funding for it. You get a few sessions of CBT and blamed if it doesn’t work (CBT is what I use to stay jnust on the right side of capable but it doesn’t actually help stop the bad days) The Tories sometimes offer a pittance, yes the numbers sound big because most people have never seen millions of pounds but there needs to be billions invested to solve the problem.
That is what I want to avoid
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That’s tough to hear because I guess over the years I’d developed a tendency to think things are better that way on the other side of the pond. Here, at least in this region, it’s already more or less a struggle to keep oneself from getting diagnosed. Thus, honestly, though I’m sure my life could turn stomachs if I blabbed about it enough, and I’ve certainly had… problems… as a result, I’m considered not mentally ill because I’ve managed to evade diagnosis and institutionalization. Avoiding treatment is how I’ve managed to survive, and at this point in my life I’m fortunate enough that I have the capacity and the means to build my own self-directed treatment plan (to me, this is the height of my own privilege and I am honestly grateful I was able to dig my little fingers into it and hold on)… but I’m also painfully aware just how impossible that is typically and how much true random good fortune it’s required me to have.
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The scary thing is I think they still are, despite the funding cuts. If you are one of the people who has medication that works then you can still get it for far less (£8.80 per item, if you are not already exempt from charges). We still have arseholes like Nigel Farage who want a more US style health system though.
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And to @TornPaperNapkin, too.
It strikes me that the stigmatization of mental illness is a big part of all this. We are meant to all exist within this very thin strata of “normal” and the fact is that most of us probably don’t actually exist there. Which means many of us are “faking” “normal” in order to cope and stay safe from being marginalized or further marginalized. Also, I think mental health is almost always made about the individual and more often than not, about brain chemistry, instead of a combination of environment and brain chemistry causes. We probably all go through periods in our lives where we need mental health services, because life is tough, even in the best of circumstances. But in the neo-liberal economy, needing help just means you’re weak, so too many of us suck it up or self-medicate, because we don’t want to be stigmatized or subjected to the danger of having our autonomy taken away.
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So he’s proposing to lock up all the ammosexuals?
Wow, talk about mixed feelings!
Doing something requires wisdom and judgement.
Doing nothing requires neither.
