Time to build them back.
Posted on 04/23/2007 6:20:59 AM PDT by RKV
I was in graduate school, studying clinical psychology when they began shutting down the asylums. The place was California, the time was the early 1970s, and "they" were an unprecedented confederation of progressives, libertarians and fiscal conservatives.
...
The best predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior, yet we regularly grant parole to murderers, serial rapists, chronically assaultive individuals and habitual pedophiles. Even when we do attempt to segregate low-impulse multiple offenders with effective tools such as with three-strikes laws, liberationist clamor never ceases.
Talk to anyone who's tried to commit a dangerously violent child or parent for even a few days: A stranger with a law degree will show up at the hearing and paint you as a fascist. So it's far too much to expect anything resembling a decisive approach to those whose level of threat remains at the verbal level.
Given the excesses of the past--husbands committing troublesome wives, involuntary sterilization of those judged defective--extreme caution is warranted. But like drunk drivers, we sway from one side of the legal road to the other and find the sensible center lane elusive.
Unless we confront the unpleasant fact that the brains of a small percentage of our citizens incubate dark, disturbed thoughts that can blossom into vicious behavior, we can look forward to repeats of last week's outrage.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
A society that takes a libertarian point-of-view toward the mentally ill also has to take a libertarian point-of-view toward armed self-defense. That’s where the equation is breaking down.
(You could say the same thing for immigration and welfare.)
I did not know that about the author. I guess he can figure out which way the wind is blowing.
People are not committed (it’s not imprisonment) by “the government.” Most of the time it is family members who try to get a person committed, usually after that person has tried to kill them or someone else or is doing things that make it impossible for him to live with them or anyone else.
Furthermore, being mentally ill is no fun. I had a family member who was a paranoid schizophrenic and she lived in fear all the time because “they” were tapping out messages on the walls about her. She lived in an apartment in New York where the heating and water pipes thump and tap a lot, and every time she heard them, she thought she was hearing a message from “them” - the people who she believed were conspiring against her.
She threatened to kill people because she thought they were part of the “plot,” she tried at one point to kill someone, and she eventually ended up living on the street - and nobody could do anything about it. Finally she attacked someone, got physically injured herself, and because she was by then old and frail, it was possible for us to get her into residential care under the guise of physical disability. But she had 20 years of hellish, full-blown psychosis before she finally got treatment.
Shrugging these people off and just saying, oh, it’s their tough luck, as long as they don’t bother me it’s fine, and if they do I’ll just shoot them, is not something for a civilized society. It’s more like Mad Max, when all structure and decency have broken down.
Time to build them back.
Yes. You will never have a civilized society free of nuts, you will never have a civilized society free of attacks, and I will never live anyplace where I am not free to carry a firearm to defend myself (of loved ones, or strangers) from nuts, criminals, accidents, overzealous authorities, or any other mortal threat.
You obviously have had very little contact with these people. I live and work in a city that had a huge State mental hospital that is now closed. My city is filled with these mentally ill people. They affect businesses, I have to call the police to my office at least twice a week because one of them has either defecated on our lobby floor - or they are screaming at the top of their lungs about flying toasters or magic garbage cans.
I know there were many abuses in the past in the Institutions - but we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
Being afraid that Hillary will lock up all her political opponents is not reason enough to not re-open these institutions.
We haven't closed all the medical hospitals even though Hitlery could send opponents there for mandatory brain surgery.
Society has an obligation to get these loonies off the streets and into a place where they are safe and we are safe from them. It costs more to keep them in jails than it would to keep them in a whacko ward.
They knew how to build them then.
We have some grand old buildings nearby, the North
Princeton Developmental Center, that were an institution for people suffering from epilepsy, mental illness and retardation. As the state began phasing out large-scale institutions, the stately buildings were closed up and ugly tract houses were built on campus.
When the Center was entirely closed down, the state neglected the place entirely. They didn’t board the windows, so the windows were broken. Rain, vandals and animals got in for years. For want of ten thousand dollars of plywood and labor, tens of millions of dollars of damage occured. Most of the buildings are unsalvageable - brick, brownstone, wood with Georgian proportions and ornaments, slate roofs, airy rooms full of light.
It wasn’t a bad place to be, out in the country, in buildings I’d love to have for a home, with a greenhouse and other peaceful occupations available. So much would depend on the care too, but being able to have today’s medicines and the old institutions would be good for so many of the mentally ill.
Mrs VS
Amen.
The simple fact is that, until the shooting, Cho had done nothing that would justify him being committed. Was he weird, did he indicate a need for mental health treatment? Sure. But I don't think I'm in favor of locking people up for what he did prior to the shooting.
good answer.
thanks.
If somebody is ill to the point of being non-functional, I think it's immoral to cut them loose on society and have them be completely on their own. It's unfair both to the person and to society at large; especially when the lives of dozens of families are needlessly shattered forever when it could have been avoided.
That's Arthur Kellerman, not Jonathan Kellerman.
This topic, commitment, is timely, regardless of the particular disability that makes it necessary. It's too bad Cho could not have been committed.
My father needed to be committed after his first hemorrhagic stroke, although they first attempted to let my father return home. According to my mother and sister, he tried to walk out of the kitchen window, which would have been about a ten foot drop. He had the stroke just before I went overseas. When I returned, his most obvious impairment was that he had no concept of time any more. He talked as if it was the 1940s when it was already 1971.
But then who would Nancy lead?
Because the Liberals make them feel guilty about their good fortune!
More better!
I hate to say it Elsie, but ya’ve hit it right on the nailhead. Criminals and mental cases (and single mothers) ARE the DemocRAT Party constituency.
ANYONE who wants the Gummint (your wallet) to GIVE them (or others) something is a Dem/Lib voter.
(You’ll note that BOTH major parties are now in this mode.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.