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The mental patients are NOT being protected by society.

The left-wing civil libertarians think even incompetent, delusional people, or people who are only temporarily stabilized and repeatedly relapse, have the right to make decisions regarding their treatment, medications, and movement. So they have liberties in a trade-off that puts them deeper into mental illness, homelessness, exposure, physical illness, being the victims of abuse and crime and committing crimes themselves.

The budget-cutters go along with the idea that “community health” settings can treat the most severely mentally ill, and pretend to believe the drugs we have now have have eliminated the need for nearly all of the hospital beds and secure facilities that used to exist. The son of the Virginia congressman who stabbed his father and killed himself had been evaluated, declared in need of treatment, and released from a hospital the day before for lack of space.

My boss and her husband loved their son so much. They tried so hard. Yes, they tried to treat him normally; they gave him a job and a car and a home but they had no way to force him to take his medication and go to treatment; he was an adult. So normality was the only thing they could offer him to try to keep him on an even keel.

They had money and they knew the health care system. The healthcare system and the legal system failed them and their son. NOW he is in a secure facility for the rest of his life, still with the right to refuse drug treatment, and still refusing.

You made my point. NOW the schizophrenic son is in a facility. WHY did someone have to die to put him there? If there is a place for him NOW, there was a place for him before.
Look- there is money involved here too- money being made by people who are willing to ‘save’ these mental patients from institutions. When the previously existing institutions closed, what happened to the patients? They weren’t killed- some were just let go into society,but there are people being PAID by the states to take them and give them a ‘normal’ life. I personally know of such people. Not only do they make money, they go through ‘pretend’ rehabilitation for the patient-which gives psychiatrists and counselors etc lots of money from the government. In the case of the individual I know of, it’s profitable—and hopeless. Years haven’t changed the patient at all, in fact he’s getting violent and even the psychiatrist is AFRAID of him. Yet he is foisted upon society, taken to Sams Club, restaurants etc.; and has to be physically prevented from acting out. Most places have banned him from their establishments.
Society is being conditioned-by the media et.al.- to pity and understand the ‘disturbed’ and dangerous. It’s costing lives and , in the end, anyone so hopelessly mental can only end tragically anyway.