Thoughts on Deinstitutionalisation

[jamil]

The talk of mental institutions kinda troubles me as a solution to whatever mental health issues might be relating to mass shootings. There’s only one or two instances where the shooter might have been institutionalized. That’s the Aurora theater shooting. I think that guy was mentally ill. Maybe there was another l, as well.

But most of these people just plain weren’t raised right. These narcissistic “incels” are losers because their parents and society are teaching them to be losers. Parents coddle successively more each generation and produce teens who can’t function. No confidence because they’re told they’re special, rather than helping them persevere through some hardships, as they able to handle them. Studies are showing that boys are falling behind in school while girls are generally thriving. And then we have the rabid feminist culture telling boys they need to be more like girls. Too many kids are growing up nihilistic with no purpose.

The ones who fall through all the cracks end up losers. No one wants to be a loser, so might as well go out winning something.

Institutionalization isn’t going to fix that. How the hell do you even know which ones need institutionalizing? Yes, I think it’s fine to talk about a solution to the severe and debilitating mental health problems. Maybe creating institutions to house and care for these people could help. But it’s not going to solve the reason we’re even talking about it.

 

[churchmouse]

The talk of mental institutions kinda troubles me as a solution to whatever mental health issues might be relating to mass shootings. There’s only one or two instances where the shooter might have been institutionalized. That’s the Aurora theater shooting. I think that guy was mentally ill. Maybe there was another l, as well.

But most of these people just plain weren’t raised right. These narcissistic “incels” are losers because their parents and society are teaching them to be losers. Parents coddle successively more each generation and produce teens who can’t function. No confidence because they’re told they’re special, rather than helping them persevere through some hardships, as they able to handle them. Studies are showing that boys are falling behind in school while girls are generally thriving. And then we have the rabid feminist culture telling boys they need to be more like girls. Too many kids are growing up nihilistic with no purpose.

The ones who fall through all the cracks end up losers. No one wants to be a loser, so might as well go out winning something.

Institutionalization isn’t going to fix that. How the hell do you even know which ones need institutionalizing? Yes, I think it’s fine to talk about a solution to the severe and debilitating mental health problems. Maybe creating institutions to house and care for these people could help. But it’s not going to solve the reason we’re even talking about it.

Gabby Giffords. The Florida shooter had a serious trail of paper stating he was off between the ears. There are others.

The nut job kid that stole moms guns killed her and shot up the school. My mind is a blank tonight. All were psycho.

 

[Spear Dane]

Gabby Giffords. The Florida shooter had a serious trail of paper stating he was off between the ears. There are others.

The nut job kid that stole moms guns killed her and shot up the school. My mind is a blank tonight. All were psycho.

Sandy Hook. That little bastard LOOKED nutty as hell too.

 

[Alamo]

Read Clayton E Cramer’s book on deinstitutionalization:

https://www.amazon.com/My-Brother-R...y+brother+Ron&qid=1566089000&s=gateway&sr=8-1

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America started a grand experiment in the 1960s: deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The consequences were very destructive: homelessness; a degradation of urban life; increases in violent crime rates; increasing death rates for the mentally ill. My Brother Ron tells the story of deinstitutionalization from two points of view: what happened to the author's older brother, part of the first generation of those who became mentally ill after deinstitutionalization, and a detailed history of how and why America went down this path. My Brother Ron examines the multiple strands that came together to create the perfect storm that was deinstitutionalization: a well-meaning concern about the poor conditions of many state mental hospitals; a giddy optimism by the psychiatric profession in the ability of new drugs to cure the mentally ill; a rigid ideological approach to due process that ignored that the beneficiaries would end up starving to death or dying of exposure.

[/FONT]

Mr. Cramer’s second amendment work has been cited in the Heller and McDonald Scotus decisions, as well as other decisions. He knows how to do research and he knows his stuff.

Fun fact: there are people who complain that we are incarcerating a higher percentage of our population than ever before. But they cite only prison statistics to support us. If you include the number of people Involuntarily kept in mental institutions, it turns out the rate of incarceration in recent decades is about the same as it was in the early 1900s. The huge implications of this is that we have simply moved the crazies from the mental hospitals to prison.

 

[churchmouse]

Sandy Hook. That little bastard LOOKED nutty as hell too.

Yup. He was a serious nut job.
The whack job that shot Giffords had a paper trail a mile long. Kicked out of college not to be allowed back on the campus. Sheriff informed. Nothing done. Nut jobs Mom worked for the sheriff. The kid in Florida same thing. They knew he was a danger ranger.

The system is not working. Implementing a more complicated system is not the answer.

 

[Alamo]

Mr. Cramer points out that the community mental health centers that the government funded in place of the mental hospitals do not treat the kind of people who or patients in the mental hospital. Community mental health centers deal with people who Have less severe issues and who will come in for treatment at least most of the time And will take their medicine. It requires some degree of voluntary cooperation by the patient. This is exactly not the kind of person that the mental institutions of yore were set up to help.

People who are paranoid, having violent thoughts, and are most likely self treating with “recreational“ drugs and alcohol instead of prescription medications Need mandatory long-term supervision to keep them from Going off the cliff and maybe taking a bunch of people with them. But this is very difficult to arrange both because there are many fewer beds now for this, and the legal hurdles have become very high. So they cycle in and out of jail and through 72 hour holds Until they do something severe enough to land them in prison.

And no I don’t believe there are only one or two of the mass shooters of recent years who were showing enough bad tendencies to be committed. A number of them gave clear indications that they needed some mandatory supervision, But the deinstitutionalization scheme is so embedded in the paradigms of psychological treatment and law that People don’t want to pursue it, and A fair amount of legal jeopardy can accrue to a decision to commit. Psychiatrists can be sued and have judgments placed against them for committing a Person that the jury decides was wrongly committed. They don’t get sued for letting people go, even when people subsequently go do harm.

 

[KMaC]

Don't forget the Boulder, CO movie theater shooter. He was actually under the care of a psychiatrist.

 

[Magneto]

My church occasionally goes to a local homeless shelter to serve meals. Every time we go there is an issue with someone that has some mental issue. Never the same person twice. They have never been violent or seemed like they would get violent but you have to be careful just in case. It really opens your eyes to who is out there now that 40 years ago probably wouldn't have been.

 

[Brad69]

I would go out on limb and say IMO the Dayton shooter would have been institutionalized as late as the early 80’s.

Once the school would have found about the rape and hit lists he would have been taking a trip.

BTW
https://www.whio.com/news/crime--la...h-him-when-shot-death/8Vr9NFKdJbCUg9YMjQKGzM/

 

[Nazgul]

I know from having someone close that really needed some institutional help, it is not available in Indiana.

What do we do??

Don

 

[DeadeyeChrista'sdad]

We get on to our legislature to stop trying to save a buck at the expense of the lives of the most vulnerable people among us. We hold their feet to the fire and make it an issue until they would rather juggle running chainsaws than not vote for better mental health care.

 

[churchmouse]

Take a tour of the alleys and back streets down town. Out east there is or was a well established hobo village and yes there are some bat crazy SOB's among them.

 

[HoosierLife]

My church occasionally goes to a local homeless shelter to serve meals. Every time we go there is an issue with someone that has some mental issue. Never the same person twice. They have never been violent or seemed like they would get violent but you have to be careful just in case. It really opens your eyes to who is out there now that 40 years ago probably wouldn't have been.

Our church picks these folks up every week and brings them to church. Some weeks 3-4 or some weeks 7-10. We watch them like hawks.

 

[Phase2]

I know from having someone close that really needed some institutional help, it is not available in Indiana.

What do we do??

Start by educating yourself on deinstitutionalization, how it happened and why. Alamo has some excellent posts above to get you started. It isn't a simple subject. And there is no simple solution. The older mental institutions had real value in treating patients and protecting both the patients and the public, but were also significant and visible costs that were easy to campaign against (both by politicians and special interest groups). There were real abuses and problems, but in my view, when various groups lobbied to switch to community outreach treatment programs (which never lived up to their claims as a more humane/cheaper solution), they ended up pushing out all of that disfunction out to affect the general public in many ways visible and invisible.

• Many of the homeless would have formerly been in these institutions
• A disproportionate chunk of our crime comes from this group. This includes a percentage of these mass murder events.
• As Alamo noted, a large number of those who can't really take care of themselves due to mental issues end up in prisons. Prisons aren't really designed for proper treatment and care of mental cases and are very expensive housing facilities. Mixing the violent with the simply disfunctional isn't a more humane way to treat these people than earlier institutionalization.

Politicians, the press, the drug industry, the psychiatric profession and "do gooders" all share responsibility for destroying a system that had real benefits rather than reforming it when problems were discovered and sensationalized. Much like many "do gooders" that are working to radically remake our nation today, they didn't appreciate the downsides to what they proposed and ended up seriously harming both the intended recipients and the rest of society. It is easy to point to forced institutionalization as "bad", particularly when you can point to clear abuses. It is harder, but necessary, to make the argument that there really are people who would be better off in institutions, even if they don't want to be there, that the rest of society benefits as well, and that simply releasing them was not more humane.

Like anyone, I wish that such a solution wasn't necessary at all. Some people can legitimately be treated on an outpatient basis and function reasonably in society. Great- let them out and help them. But eliminating the institutions was a bad choice. Once you understand this history and its effects, you will be in a much better position to push for change.

 

[Twangbanger]

When I look at those videos and photos of abuses in the "old" institutions, I really think we're talking about two different problems. The most egregious horrors of the old system seemed to involve people at a very low functional level who cannot even feed themselves. If you loaded an assault rifle and handed it to those people, they probably would not be capable of carrying out an attack.

Today's mass-shooters are higher-functioning individuals with the ability to plan ahead, but yet with incredible degrees of emotional disturbance.

Antidepressants and antianxiety medications can allow people like these to "fake" their way to adulthood with a spotless criminal background.

Clearly these individuals cannot simply be allowed to circulate unsupervised in the general population. But how do you get it done? The parents are in complete denial.

I'm really starting to think the solution has to be good old-fashioned law enforcement. The Dayton shooter reportedly had mental health counseling receipts in his pocket the moment he was killed. It's evident the counselors in that scenario are working for the shooter; not for society. They see him as a patient and get paid on his insurance to treat him and do what's best for _him_. What about the interests of society?

Regardless what resources are and aren't available for them to get institutional treatment, it's become clear their parents are never going to put them there until acted upon by some strong, unopposable outside force. It's starting to look like that outside force is going to have to be law enforcement, in the form of a conviction record that simply can't be ignored. We have to re-think our policy of not wanting to prosecute children under any circumstances.

 

[jamil]

Sandy Hook. That little bastard LOOKED nutty as hell too.

I think that monster was created by his doting mom. He may have also had some form of autism. Not sure. But given the right parents he could have been just fine on his own.

 

[Twangbanger]

I think that monster was created by his doting mom. He may have also had some form of autism. Not sure. But given the right parents he could have been just fine on his own.

The parents were obviously not equipped to deal. But just curious: how do you know parenting alone, by itself, would have made Adam Lanza able to handle life on his own? Not talking about "other kids like him that you've seen." We're talking about Adam Lanza. I don't think you know what you say you know.

 

[jamil]

Yup. He was a serious nut job.
The whack job that shot Giffords had a paper trail a mile long. Kicked out of college not to be allowed back on the campus. Sheriff informed. Nothing done. Nut jobs Mom worked for the sheriff. The kid in Florida same thing. They knew he was a danger ranger.

The system is not working. Implementing a more complicated system is not the answer.

Yeah, the Gabby Giffords shooter comes to mind as well. But I think we're talking about two kinds of nuts here. Okay, poor choice of words, but you know what I mean. There's the mentally ill kind, schizophrenia (Aurora theater shooter), or bipolar, or some other kind of serious mental illness. And then there is just plain ****ed up, by parents, drug abuse, circumstances, whatever. Most of the shooters we're seeing now I think fall into the latter category. The "incel" type, for example. They're losers. And they don't know how not to be losers. And they blame the world for it. Reinstating institutionalization isn't gonna fix the latter.

 

[churchmouse]

Yeah, the Gabby Giffords shooter comes to mind as well. But I think we're talking about two kinds of nuts here. Okay, poor choice of words, but you know what I mean. There's the mentally ill kind, schizophrenia (Aurora theater shooter), or bipolar, or some other kind of serious mental illness. And then there is just plain ****ed up, by parents, drug abuse, circumstances, whatever. Most of the shooters we're seeing now I think fall into the latter category. The "incel" type, for example. They're losers. And they don't know how not to be losers. And they blame the world for it. Reinstating institutionalization isn't gonna fix the latter.

Maybe not but we have to catch and keep the latter. Not sure how what where or how but seriously. They are growing in numbers.


Edit.....I said "How" 2ice. That is the real issue.

 

[jamil]

Mr. Cramer points out that the community mental health centers that the government funded in place of the mental hospitals do not treat the kind of people who or patients in the mental hospital. Community mental health centers deal with people who Have less severe issues and who will come in for treatment at least most of the time And will take their medicine. It requires some degree of voluntary cooperation by the patient. This is exactly not the kind of person that the mental institutions of yore were set up to help.

People who are paranoid, having violent thoughts, and are most likely self treating with “recreational“ drugs and alcohol instead of prescription medications Need mandatory long-term supervision to keep them from Going off the cliff and maybe taking a bunch of people with them. But this is very difficult to arrange both because there are many fewer beds now for this, and the legal hurdles have become very high. So they cycle in and out of jail and through 72 hour holds Until they do something severe enough to land them in prison.

And no I don’t believe there are only one or two of the mass shooters of recent years who were showing enough bad tendencies to be committed. A number of them gave clear indications that they needed some mandatory supervision, But the deinstitutionalization scheme is so embedded in the paradigms of psychological treatment and law that People don’t want to pursue it, and A fair amount of legal jeopardy can accrue to a decision to commit. Psychiatrists can be sued and have judgments placed against them for committing a Person that the jury decides was wrongly committed. They don’t get sued for letting people go, even when people subsequently go do harm.

I think the Dayton shooter fit more of what you're talking about. He seemed to be clearly a problem. Probably the Parkland shooter as well. The El Paso guy wasn't. No one had a clue. He was on no one's radar. Yoga shooter, the Toronto dude who used a vehicle, Eliot Roger in California, and a host of many others. You can bring back institutionalization, and clearly some people need that. But that's not going to stop mass shootings.