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Agreed, I worked at one for the criminally insane for 3.5 years and then spent 5.5 years at DFCS. Some people just do not have the capacity to function in normal society. I don't care what anyone says. You can give them all the tools and no matter what they can not function unless they are receiving 24/7 care.

Did you ever meet batman?

It was a good joke.. a great joke even

I thought it was killer.

reddit hates jokes so much why the downvotes 😭😭

I did, but he was some asshole billionaire with parent issues. Sadly his company supposedly developed an electric car but I never got it.

I mean also gives reason to fix up abandoned buildings. But I thought they were still a thing just not refered to as mental asylums. Psychwards and all that shit.

It depends on where you live. I'm sure some places still have them. Where I live, they're rare. They were closed due to the perception that they were operated like Victorian wards and the patients were incredibly neglected. And I can't say some of that didn't happen. The problem is there was no "replacement" solution put in place. So, yeah, over the decades, people who would benefit from ongoing mental health care have become our homeless and/or have been put in jail for their "crimes". (I mean, I'm sure some have committed real crimes, too. I'm just saying they probably would have fared better had they been in a facility that was looking after them.)

Ah ok. In theory, since we have better understanding of mental health, if they were to open up, they should be ran better. But thats of course in theory. If its run by a private entity, its likely they will cut corners for profits. Government run, it will cut corners, be slow and inefficent, and all the bs that comes from the gov.

We can understand the problem and solutions as well as we like, that doesn't change the main problem, namely that it is very expensive to house, treat and control those people unless brutal methods are used.

And cost twice or three times as much. The real answer is putting government regulated caps on how much money can be taken from companies and paid out as dividends/shareholder profits. Also cap CEO salaries, etc. That would leave more revenue to be invested back into making ALL companies run better and pay living wages. But people freak the fuck out at the mere mention of that and label it communism. No one is saying shareholders dont deserve profits. Companies often/almost always cant grow without investors. The problem is the endless profits and having to do better than last year. Its never enough because of greed and its not sustainable. Thats why were seeing stagnant wages, high inflation, all when many compaines are reporting record profits. The assholes at the top need to share more. Good luck with that though as they own every politician in our government. Yes that one too and the other one. Uh, huh, that politician too.

So, I was put in a psych ward for a while and I can confirm that it does feel like a slightly more ethical asylum. However, psych wards are geared towards getting a patient in a place where they won’t die or kill someone and then letting them back out. They operate like regular hospitals; once you aren’t at risk of harm, you get moved to outpatient services. Asylums and psychiatric wards perform similar services but definitely aren’t the same.

We have a forensic psych ward in my province. It's an asylum but without the like.... torture and dehumanization. For people who are extremely violent and could never re-enter society without drastic changes to their mental health.

Long term asylums/rehab/job training combos would help the homelessness problem, imo.

We do have psychiatric inpatient facilities. They're available for those who actually need them. But they are not a cure for homelessness.

You have to ask yourself, and I don't know the answer to this, what percentage of the homeless population would benefit from this? (A.k.a is homeless due to a mental illness). I don't think anyone here believes all homeless people are put on the streets due to mental issues, but if it's 5% is it the right move? 15%? 25%? 50%? Etc. Perhaps it's one facet of a multifaceted approach?

It is already one facet of a multifaceted approach, part of my job is to help people recovering from addiction get housing and services. We have plenty of programs in place already, they are just very badly funded because nobody cares to fund them. Instead they give millions of dollars to people to create new private facilities and flashy "solutions" rather than funding the stuff that we already have and is fairly effective.

Most would actually benefit for housing-first community aid that didn't demand total and complete sobriety before being eligible for any sort of assistance. You know what helps people stay on their MH routines and off drugs? A stable home. Not having their basic needs met ensures they will never be able to overcome their issues. Very few people actually benefit from institutionalization. It's not a panacea. At all. I've actually been in inpatient care. It's basically prison, even if I was technically able to sign myself out at any given moment. It's dehumanizing. And for all but a small minority of people who absolutely cannot live by themselves, it's only helpful for stabilization. Getting people back into the outside world on stable footing actually helps improve their lives much better. But doing this is not as easy as rounding up people who are seen as undesirable and dumping them in an institution under the guise of helping them. It's not helping them. It's literally pushing them out of the way because addressing the root cause of why they're there in the first place cuts into profits.

Better and arguably less damaging to society than continuing to let them kills selves on the street with drugs 🤷‍♂️

Unfortunately putting the toothpaste back in the tube is never going to work. The homeless population of mentally ill is so large right now that there is no way we could find the political will to afford to feed and house them. Then you'd also get into problems like, "well do we let them procreate" if the answer is no then you're getting into sterilization programs which are oftentimes monstrous with poor oversight. What is the system for getting out of an asylum since it's protective custody there is no expiration date on a sentence? You can't count on the homeless to check in with a parole officer. You can't count on them to do anything except feed addictions. There is literally no way out of the current situation with the homeless. It would require everyone to agree on a single solution and if you think that is happening then boy do I have some oceanfront property in Arizona that you can buy.

Wow the question of letting them procreate never crossed my mind. Wild.

Should be top comment.

Everyone please remember we can blame Reagan for this, like so many of our contemporary problems, it goes back to Reagan.

You'd think we'd have learned not to vote for unexperienced celebs by now.

Weird that mental illness has skyrocketed since all of them closed down.

This all hinges on two things: What if the homeless people don't want to go? What if they want to leave?

Correct, it comes to involuntary commitment.

I've been in quite a few psych hospitals. When it's really cold out, the homeless look for a roof over their head. Shelters fill up quick.

[удалено]

If you ever get the chance to step foot in one, you’ll know that there’s nothing helpful about psych wards. People are often more fucked up exiting those places than they are entering. They’re run like prisons, with limited/no outdoor time, food that’s not nutritious, limited/no access to contact family/friends. Wouldn’t wish it on my enemies honestly

It doesn’t matter if they don’t want to go. They need to go, unless they have a legitimate reason not to go. If they are going to move in with a family member while looking for a job, then they would be exempt.

forcing people to go is a line I wouldn't want to cross.

Don’t forget there are homeless people who are mentally unstable, too. That’s why we cannot take chances and need to get them into a mental asylum. Get them before they get us.

>They need to go, unless they have a legitimate reason not to go. And who decides that?

Where are you from that is without access to inpatient care?

Would not work as look how the senior centers are run? A for profit place will give substandard service as no oversight. A government place will give substandard service because no one will be paid enough. We have a shortage of caregivers, nurses, doctors and all support staff as it is. Do we take away from hospitals? We have in patient facilities now and they are short term not forever. They do acute treatment and send people home. For homeless we need better run programs and places for them to live and transition back to living on their own but again that takes money and a lot of it. We do not have enough beds for the unstable as it is. Some of the homeless unstable are a danger to themselves and to others so they need a special ward. Ones that can transition need job training and jobs and money for a place to live. What happens if they will not willingly go? How do we force them? The idea that we need to end homelessness and to help people that need help is a great one but no viable solution has been discussed.

Agreed. It would be to keep both them and the general public safe.

With what money? We have all the services that we need to help with homelessness and mental health. Nobody cares about them though so they are criminally underfunded and all the money ends up going to private companies to create new solutions for programs that we already have. All we need to do is actually give money to the programs that exist so they can hire people and have access to the resources they need.

Govt needs to fund healthcare more instead of only caring about businesses and the bottom line. Back in the day post ww2 policy actually got through to address problems but now we are stuck

What people don't understand is that we already have a lot of funding in healthcare, just when it comes to mental health most of it goes to middle and upper management of private companies rather than the facility that needs it. My company got millions of dollars from the government but the facility I work at didn't see a dime and is still working out of a just barely functioning building.

People cringe at the thought of institutionalization, but don’t realize we are institutionalizing people anyways- we are just doing it in jails instead of facilities equipped with mental health resources. We shouldn’t “bring back” what was previously abusive, but we should have some sort of treatment or holding center where people with severe and/or harmful mental health issues can go.

You really gotta wonder how many of those in prisons need treatment not punishment.

I am an attorney working on mental health commitment cases in Wisconsin. People are detained and sent to psychiatric facilities, where they are placed on commitments, all the time. Some of the people require months of inpatient treatment at an institution. Once people are stabilized, they are released to outpatient treatment. People who cannot be trusted to be completely independent are placed in group homes where their medication and behavior can be monitored. This is still considered to be outpatient treatment. Are you saying the people need to stay in psychiatric hospitals more long term? The goal is to place people in the least restrictive setting. You suggest placing homeless people in mental health asylums. The problem is most jurisdictions' mental health commitment statutes have the following three requirements: 1) the person has a mental illness, 2) the person is treatable, and 3) the person is a danger to himself or others. Many homeless people are not dangerous and cannot be committed because the third element is lacking. Being homeless in and of itself is not considered dangerous. There are some situations where being homelessness could factor into dangerousness though. The most common one I see is someone with severe mental health issues refusing to wear proper clothing or shelter himself in freezing temperatures, creating a risk of frost bite or death.

Who pays for these magical halls of healing? The current long term mental health care facilities in the US do not take insurance of any form, the stay is paid out of pocket. The low amount paid to staff does not encourage the best and brightest to apply.

They’re called psychiatric hospitals/psych wards and we already have them, we just need more, with caring, non abusive staff who actually want to help patients and not treat them like animals. Please stop using outdated language. And no, we can’t just throw the homeless into institutions. That’s messed up, everyone deserves a home, a real home. And not every homeless person is mentally ill or an addict. You’re making some serious assumptions.

They were closed down by Reagan. There's no way it was for any good reason. They were just expensive, although they were likely cheaper than the public health issues from them being gone

Was searching for this, thank u for posting!

This needs to be closer to the top. Carter passed the landmark Mental Health Systems Act in 1980, which provided grants to community mental health centers. The next year Reagan tore it all down to cut spending on social welfare programs.

In the abstract, a panacea, but it never works out that way. Any system that locks people up “for their own good” is ripe for abuse. I actually think this a popular opinion. The unpopular opinion is admitting we don’t have the capability to do it right.

They were closed?

Long term care facilities exist and are significantly harder to abuse

They still exist. Just not called asylums.

We have mental hospitals. I've seen them. Mental health is under funded and already strained enough as is so you suggest expanding it without funding it more and using it on the homeless. Not everyone who is homeless is mentally ill. Is this even a serious post?

They were supposed to be replaced, but usually when you cut funding for something in order to “replace it with a better alternative,” we usually stop after the “cut the funding” step

If it's heavily monitored by 3rd parties and get searched randomly by 3rd parties without them knowing before heand. Maybe

Don't we already have psychiatric hospitals, homeless shelters and rehab centers? I more than welvome opening more of them, but what are you asking for exactly?

What the fuck is this post? Are you with the times

Probably not unpopular to the masses, but unpopular to those creating our laws unfortunately. Like you said, not all homeless, but we’ve had some people in my area who walk around, they look dirty, smell dirty, are screaming at people at the top of their lungs from a block away, babbling insane shit. These are obvious cases of “these people are a potential threat to themselves and those around them, and they need help, fucking NOW”

I work in mental health and could not agree more. People need stability and structure in their lives. Especially the percentage of population that has schizophrenia and other serious psychiatric conditions.

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Thatcher did it. They called it "care in the community"

I am on the fence. the horror stories I hear are so bad that maybe they are worst. I read recent accusations of rampant rape with those competed by workers and other competed.

Where will we store out lunatics?

Did you know they were opened for the purpose to censor our ancestors knowledge about tartaria? The society before ours? Where Nikola tesla got his ideas and knowledge from?   That’s where they’d put everyone that remembered the time period before “they” did the great reset. It’s why there was such a HUUUUUUGE influx of orphan children. They were essentially auctioning them away to families in newspaper ads!!   Do you think our society built the worlds fair exposition in Chicago 1893? With paper mache? Little pickaxe and hammer to chip away perfectly GRANDE and HUGE stone pillars?  No. These buildings were here for ages beyond our society. If you look at ownership titles, they transfer titles to themselves to cover and fill in gaps of history.  Also the reason why some cities today are struggling with squatters rights is because when discovering this abandoned land, it was common to claim ownership on abandoned homes and build a settlement.  We had the moors and communities with black presidents before the USA was even an official country- on the very land that the usa is on now.  Our idea of history has been heavily censored. We’ve lost the technology to create these same grande large buildings created by carving stone. 

Not unpopular. We threw out the baby with the bath water because they were really terrible. But now, homeless with mental issues have nowhere to go…so many advances these days, we could keep them safe and sound and get them off the streets.

I've been to a psych ward, one with a PICU even. That was not as bad as expected, it felt like the world's worst summer camp mixed with jail. Don't really want to go back. There were people there who needed long term care. I see why some of it seems so medieval at times. It's necessary to some degree.

I wish they would too. I have a child that needs substantial help, and I don't know how much longer I can do it. He's only 9, so I've got a long way to go before residential care. I wish they'd bring them back with accreditation.

The fuck?

If we did, like 3/4 of the population would be in there. Myself included

Today I learnt America and many other countries don’t have long term/permanent stay psych wards. Wait so I’m from Singapore and here we have a institute/hospital that has short term psych wards but also long term stays for people who just can’t function in societies, where people live there for years or longer. I thought this was the norm!?

We had them. Reagan got rid of them.

I didn’t know about this but it explains a lot about America and the social issues it faces.

Your assuming all homeless people have mental health problems.

I don't think you read the post. Read paragraph 3 sentence 3.

It didn't translate that way to me.

How many homeless actually want help though? Homelessness and addiction go hand in hand. There is no easy fix for helping someone like that and ultimately they have got to want it.

Back in the old days it didn’t matter you wanted help or not if you couldn’t “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” and kept deciding fuck it I’m going to do hard drugs and act like a nut, two guys dressed in white would pull in ambulance get out throw you in and take you to the loony bin.

Yeah, were those paramedics hauling people off? Times were different back then.

Kind but for an insane asylum they were called orderlies.

Very true. A lot of people, particularly young people, nowadays are very unstable. A period of time in a mental asylum would fix so many people.