But! It’s Madness!

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve been very disturbed by various “mental” health initiatives and attempt to codify declarations of madness into law.

No, I don’t think Trump is evil or Hitler. Yes, I do think mental health is a massive crisis in this country and we need to do something. I just want so many bumpers and padding on that “something” that it’s not even funny. And I’m absolutely sure whatever we do, the left will weaponize once they get power again.

Weaponize? you ask?

Well, you see, every communist country committed their opposition to madhouses, sanatoriums and rest homes for being mentally unwell. I remember in the late eighties going to a lot of talks by poets and writers from anywhere ranging from East Germany to Russia, who had spent years in various kind of mental health hold ups and sometimes heavily “medicated” for their crime of not being communists. How they were treated was a sliding scale of how well known they were abroad. If they weren’t well known at all, they got the harshest treatment.

And the most horrifying, scariest part about this is that in doing so the communists (yes, they called themselves socialists, mostly) weren’t being hypocrites. They really thought it was mental illness. Particularly the ones who’d gone through various college programs. They were taught the full on “weird Christian heresy” tale, including that humans in the beginning shared everything and there were no hierarchies or private property. And then property and hierarchy appeared, and that twisted humanity. (Yes, it’s Eden and the fall dressed up in red clothes, with a little hammer and sickle.) So communism restored sanity and allowed humans to be sane. And to reject communism was a mark of insanity. (Curiously, being insane was also a mark of being an opponent of communism. They had the courage of their delusion.)

How do I know this? Well. I read a lot of AMERICAN psychiatry manuals in the seventies, and they — as usual for academics — had bought the entire story from the Soviet Union lock, stock and barrel.

Part of the push for the de-institutionalization of the mad — something given full court press, from A Flight Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to various stories in all the sf mags, to oh so many biographies from “feminists” claiming that promiscuous women were treated like mad and institutionalized because they were “just” trying to live naturally (There are various reasons why promiscuous women should be institutionalized. NO, not ALL promiscuous women, duh. BUT there are forms of mental illness and self-abuse that manifest that way. The fact these stories blur the distinction between “likes sex and likes men” and “can’t control herself and sleeps with people who might kill her, and has caught three venereal diseases this week” is your first warning they’re unsound — was because the Soviet Union’s sincere belief they were doing the sane and logical thing bled over here.

And if you’re going to say “Sure, but people here will never be convinced that people who disagree are insane” you’re whistling past the graveyard. The well intentioned ones on the other side already do.

That is the people who used to be friends, who know I’m not evil or stupid, or uneducated think I’ve gone “peculiar” which is British for raving mad.

And they’re utterly serious about it, and utterly honest for a change. Which is where the danger lies, to be honest.

The truth is that when your entire concepts of the world are completely opposed, it’s impossible not to end up thinking these other people must be crazy. How often do we say the other side is mentally ill?

Which is the danger of this whole thing.

Is it a danger insofar as putting the homeless in institutions where they can be looked after? Well… no. Not if restricted in certain ways. BUT the problem is that once the bureaucracy is in place, you can’t restrict it that tightly.

Look, I fully understand that we can’t go on the way we are.

And in the same way, I’ll say — about the full court press above — that yes, I’m aware that mental health accusations and commitment were improperly used in the past. Because mental health is hellishly difficult to diagnose. You know something is very wrong, but … there’s a spectrum?

People today make fun of the idea that people in the past thought the mentally ill were possessed. Having found myself attempted-cornered by a homeless guy, and looking in his eyes seeing nothing human, I’m not sure the middle ages were wrong in every case.

Were they wrong in some? Well, we diagnosed a vast amount of physical illness as mental, because it’s all connected. Epilepsy was considered a form of madness, for instance.

Also, the “village madman” who died committed to a madhouse was probably only suffering from a case of a recognized syndrome that comes in the aftermath of a stroke (I can’t find the link now but was horrified when I found it) where you decide some part of your body doesn’t belong to you, and will not look after it. Unfortunately for this man he declaimed ownership of everything below the neck. So when his mother failed to force him to dress (He was a very distant cousin, and built like my kids, while his mom was a normal-sized Portuguese woman) he’d run through the streets of the village mother-naked and screaming “it’s not mine.”

This kind of illustrates the issues with mental health. This was HIS ONLY quirk. He was calm, biddable, would still work, was not a danger to himself and others. Except he wouldn’t wash or dress below the neck, because it wasn’t his.

It might be “just” the result of a stroke and physical, not mental, but what the heck do you even do with it?

The village mothers decided they couldn’t have this giant guy randomly running mother-naked through the street and went to the city fathers and got them to take him and have him committed.

I don’t know how he was treated in the mental hospital. Look, yes, bad mental hospitals existed. It wasn’t all propaganda. I figure the percentage was the same as bad old age homes or bad care for disabled children (because dealing with the helpless.) Which is WAY higher than bad normal hospitals.

And maybe that’s something we can do something about, though G-d help me, the government would make an ash of it and I don’t know any other institution that will reliably supervise and not make it worse.

I used to think the place the man was committed was one of the good ones and well run, but then in high school I met a young man who had been committed between 12 and 14 due to some emotional breakdown when his mother died, and during those two years he was raped countless times, which screwed him up more. So it was, at the very least, poorly supervised at times? (And I do realize administrators are human.)

So yeah, there are horrors, and there’s a responsibility towards making sure people who are committed are at least as well treated as prisoners in minimum security wards?

On the other hand, you know, what we have is untenable. Because schizophrenics for instance, can be controlled with medication. The problem is making them take the medication. And if you want to read fully on how cruel we are being to the mentally ill by letting them live on the streets, read My Brother Ron. (Yes, that, as all book links on this site are linked to my associate account and I get a tiny portion of the purchase at no extra cost to you.)

To make it even more cruel, there are predators and just regular bad people who hide among the homeless and are neither mentally ill nor disablingly drug addicted. I found this out by spending time in a downtown area with lots of homeless and hearing the talk. A lot were what I call “homeless by choice” and thought we who insisted on having jobs, paying our bills, etc. were idiots. A not insignificant portion of these preys on the mentally ill homeless.

And then there’s yet the other side. The people who owned small ma and pa shops in downtown Colorado Springs that ended up closing because the mentally ill would chase their customers around yelling stuff, or come in and pee on the merchandise, or menace them and passerbyes downtown.

Homelessness, as practiced in 20th century America (and all over the west, because we exported the damn psychiatry books) is not a victimless crime.

I’m wary and horrified about talk of involuntary commitment. Because I know it can become a horrifying weapon against political dissidents or (merely) the very Odd (like most of us.)

On the other hand, I’m also aware a significant portion of the “unhoused” (I love how we keep concentrating on that, like THAT is the relevant part. “Rebarbarized” would be a better term.) are a danger to themselves and others. AND by giving the predators a hiding place, are making our cities (and a lot of small towns and villages) frankly unlivable.

So what is my solution. I don’t know, short of “Sure, we do need to reopen mental institutions, with a lot” A LOT “of safety bumpers” including in what meds can even be administered, because a lot of these can kill people either by using too long or on the withdrawal.

Because we can’t go on as we’ve been. At this point it’s like embodied mental illness, spread to the whole of society.

On the other hand it’s almost impossible not to worry about how it will be weaponized and used in bad ways.

You’ll tell me the left is quite capable of doing it to us without us doing it onto them first, and fair point. In fact, if Kamala had won, people like me would be in the crosshairs of “We must institutionalize these poor mad people now.” They were leaning that way for a long time with all of their “disinformation” bs.

And perhaps actually that’s a reason to do it now, and to build in as many safeguards as possible. And hope they hold for a little while at least.

Sometimes the best you can do is the best you can do. “And let the devil worry about the rest” as mom would say.

The problem is that the devil (in the non-metaphysical sense) is very inventive. And I fear what hell do about the rest.

128 thoughts on “But! It’s Madness!”

  2. When I am feeling particularly skeptical and curmudgeonly, which is more and more of my spare time when not being Mad as Hell leaves me believing that the whole push to fill the streets with homeless crazy people is to make the public clamor for huge institutions for “residential mental health treatment” which the dark powers that be will immediately use to institutionalize all those who oppose them. It places us in a no win situation. [as they cackle evilly in background]

    Liked by 5 people

    2. Think of it as “intentional in-migration of the worst of the Third World” only sourced conveniently from well inside our own borders. And see also, “Fidel Castro emptied the prisons and asylums.”

      Yes, it all does seem to be a (worldwide) plan.

      One big problem with that plan: there are (see assorted remarks of Our Esteemed Blogmistress) rather more of “us” than there are of “them” — and here I mean that self-named “elite” who would like to rule, in their “enlightened rationality” of course, overriding all opposition. Plus hangers-on.

      So, really it can’t succeed; but it just might manage to fail very ugly.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. THIS with bells on.

    We might have to make the sacrifice and take the risk from sheer common humanity, and pray that the guardrails are sufficient.

    Might be wise to start gaming those boundaries earlier, the way Team Trump had a gameplan for term 2.0

    The term I use is migratory dysfunctional.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. If they’re likely to do it, then we’d better do it first. Bonus if we do is that it drains a reservoir of their paid protesters and shock troops and, as Sarah said, removes a place where it’s easy for the vilest of predators to hide.

      If we don’t, what’s most likely? In order, I’d say this: One, the “homeless” problem just keeps getting worse because the Democrats *want* it to (they profit from it). Two, at some point politicians will enter Do Something mode and Congress will do what it usually does and create something stupid, unworkable, and easily weaponized. Three, Democrats get back into power and magnanimously “fix” the problem with malice aforethought.

      Somebody downthread mentioned the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and I think that’s more or less what this is. If we don’t hit first, we lose in every scenario that follows, so it behooves us to do it while we can, and do our best to do it right.

      But it’s dangerous. It doesn’t do any good if we gain the world but lose our souls in the process. And there’s a long history of conservatives/Republicans creating a government tool to solve a specific problem, only for Democrats to weaponize it against everyone else. (Over and over and over again…Trump did it too; look at what happened to CISA during covid times). And the profession that would administer the help the insane need has long since been taken over by leftists.

      Anyway, I don’t know what’s right. Just trying to reason through some things. It’s a Gordian knot, to be sure.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. For some (most?) significant problems there is no absolutely “right” or “good” solution; only less bad ones. Choose the least bad we can, implement it, and try to keep an eagle eye on it as long as possible.

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  5. Nod.

    It’s interesting to me that the Left wants to call us “insane, nutty, etc” while so many of them are Insane, as defined by “being out of touch with Reality”.

    So yes, if the Left is anywhere connected with the “Mental Health Industry”, I can’t trust any sort of “Mental Health Industry”.

    Liked by 1 person

    3. And you shouldn’t.
      Quacks abound, and it does harm as often as it does good.

      I had a few years of hell when my twins were on SSRIs. They were depressed over us moving, and my wife and their pediatrician demanded they start on anti-depressants to help deal with it. But the meds made them psychotic. And the answer was always higher doses and more meds. Which meant more unbalanced side effects, more violence, more destruction, more manipulation. (And let’s not even discuss the therapists. One of which tried to convince my daughter that she was actually a boy. I was not amused.)

      They’ve been “dry” for two years now, and are doing well (especially considering all the lost time). And my wife will not forgive me for it.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I realized I’m autistic and ADHD about a year and a half ago, and I’ve learned a lot since then — both about myself, about autism and ADHD, and about the history of the discovery of these conditions. (Well, of autism, at least, I can only suspect that ADHD has its own very rocky history — I just haven’t delved into it yet.)

        As much as I’m thankful for the psychiatric efforts it took to identify autism, and gradually advance from “everyone with autism should be institutionalized” to “wow, a lot of intelligent people are autistic as well!”, the history of getting there is horrible. The automatic assumptions that everyone with this “affliction” needs institutionalization — the theory that it was mothers who didn’t love their children who caused this (never mind that the kids with this did really weird things, and they had siblings who were normal) — the belief that autistics weren’t human, and thus needed to be trained like animals to become so — these are just a handful of ideas that afflict the history of the condition.

        It would have been very nice to know about these conditions when I was 5, or 10, or perhaps even 15 years old — but that would have been in the early 1980s to early 1990s — and our understanding of autism at the time was extremely biased and weird, and I would likely have been considered “special” and put through countless hours of ABA “therapy” — and would have likely come out of all of it a much greater basket-case than I have done so as it is. Indeed, even without this diagnosis, I was always on the skirts of “advanced” programs — I only barely made it in “Gifted and Talented” in the 9th Grade, yet once I got there, I thrived just fine! (As I look back on my experience in “Gifted and Talented”, I couldn’t help but suspect that at least half of us were either autistic, or ADHD, or both — and all of us, regardless, had the intelligence to be pretty good at hiding it!)

        In my case, I have been burned out for about 15 years — but I had always been afraid of going to a doctor and mention the D word, because I was almost certain I would be given an anti-depressant, when I was almost certain that my problem was a lifestyle one (possibly fixed by another job, for example). Now that I know about autism, and am aware that so many autistics have had a lifetime of diagnoses like OCD, bipolar disorder, depression, etc, without any of the treatments not working very well … until someone says “hey, you’ve been autistic all your life, and this is what you can do about it” — and everything suddenly falls into place!

        So, yeah: the psychiatric profession has helped us understand ourselves better, and have even found certain treatments for certain things to help us in our day-to-day lives (which is why I’m currently trying ADHD medication, to see if I find it helpful) … but they also have a long history of misdiagnosis and bad treatments … so it’s hard to look to them for answers for all these conditions they have found, and it’s hard to trust the profession to do the right thing.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Yeah, I’ve gotten to the point where I should pursue an ADHD diagnosis, if for no other reason than to clarify certain things. (I’ve been told that my health insurance won’t pursue one for adults if you’re not looking to go on medication—sure, I’ll try that, to see if it’s helpful.)

          If it does turn out to be the case, I will be VERY thankful I wasn’t diagnosed as a kid, because Ritalin was rough. The modern meds can basically be a buffered strong caffeine. (And… I don’t drink caffeine. Weird, I know, but I don’t like the taste/smell of coffee, tea tastes like burnt leaves to me, and soda isn’t my thing.)

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Oh, gads, the “ice mother” theory….

          “Hey, the kid seriously hates being touched! Must be the mother isn’t loving, it totally can’t be that the kid is having an overstimulation meltdown and that touch input is Simply Too Much.”

          I had to threaten physical violence against a couple of “helpful” church ladies who decided to get grabby with our daughter who was having an overstimulation meltdown. On the upside, a snarl of “if you lay a hand on her again, I will remove it from your arm” got through the “I mean well” fog.

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          1. We got really lucky with the daycare we chose for our son. He was 7 months when he started. Not walking unaided, but crawling. We told the daycare that if he “self isolated” (i.e. back into a corner on his own) leave him alone, he will rejoin on his own. Do not force him. He needed “a minute”. They followed through. What was interesting was what started happening. There were two others that started about the same time, all same age (with a week). The school called them the 3 Musketeers. The other two never started it, but anytime our son took his timeout, one or both would join him and wit with him. What was really cute was the actual “timeouts” imposed for an infraction on any one of the three (toddler stuff, have to interrupt the undesirable activity). The other two would join the timeout. Drove the staff insane. I mean it was adorable and what they wanted to do was laugh, but couldn’t. Son eventually outgrew the desire to visibly physically self isolate. The 3 Musketeers were together through age four when they all went off to different school system kindergartens.

            “I had to threaten physical violence against a couple of “helpful” church ladies who decided to get grabby with our daughter“

            –

            What the heck? Non-custodial adults never touch a child without the child’s permission. Not even family members.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. What the heck? Non-custodial adults never touch a child without the child’s permission. Not even family members.

              I honestly hadn’t thought too hard on why on earth they thought it was acceptable to violate a pretty standard boundary, beyond “we mean well,” but– I think I just figured it out, based on age and demographics of the church involved.

              They had the 1.85 children, who were properly enrolled in a high quality daycare no later than six months of age, the nanny came along on family vacation, kids had their gap year and completed 6 years of college before “dating seriously,” and if they have grandkids they’re on the far side of the country and are seen one week a year.

              They had never actually seen a meltdown, not without the nanny swooping in to get it out of sight. Much less someone taking care of it on her own, without “experts,” so clearly she needed help, which since with that many children she’s clearly underclass and has no nanny, so Well Intentioned Older Women to the rescue.

              And it was a rather major meltdown, because with the cement steps I couldn’t let her flop and risk serious injury, and it was too soggy to set her on the grass, but too hot to be wrapped in a blanket.

              (The demographics are, roughly, “Seattle couples where a really major cost cutting year is staying inside the lower 48 for the vacation.” My childhood valley was where a lot had their second or more homes.)

              Liked by 1 person

        3. Life is never simple. Unloving mothers can produce a syndrome that outwardly presents the same symptoms as autism.

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  6. One of C’s and my dearest friends used to work in the main city library in San Diego. She told us about the expensive books of art reproductions that had to be discarded after street people came in and urinated on them. (Not because they needed to: The library had micturatoria! Sheer malevolence, if you ask me.)

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  7. Yowza.

    I’ve been homeless twice. Both times in California. In the 80’s it was because I preferred recreational chemicals over responsibility. In the late ’90’s it was because a studio apartments rent was almost more than I made in a month. The bed or bench seat of my pickup sufficed until a dairy I used to work offered to rent me the hunting shack on the hill. Warm & dry, if a bit hard to get to.

    Around twenty-five years ago, I became a guest of one of those ‘hospitals’, well the 3rd floor anyway. Not because I was certifiable, at least as far as I considered, but the wife and I weren’t getting along. I drank a lot and my MiL devised a plan to get me removed from my home. see, if you call the sheriff’s department every day and tell them, “He’s drinking and he’s got guns, and we’re afraid of what he might do.” Well eventually, the deputies get tired of showing up and they just take you away for “observation”.

    Word to the wise, don’t call the resident Psychiatrist an asshole or you’ll spend 7 episodes in 17 days doing the Thorazine shuffle. Twice the nurses told me was because he didn’t like the way i looked at him. So at the requisite commitment hearing the judge asked if I knew why I was there.

    “Yes sir. I drink too much and I scare people.”

    That was good enough for him. I did a month in spin dry and have been sober since.

    One of the times I got dragged down the hall was for noticing that likely the only reason I was there was I had good insurance. When the Doc asked what I meant by that I reminded him that just the day before they’d cut a guy loose who had no insurance. He’d lit a dog on fire and beat it to death with a shovel. He got walked to the entrance, but I had to stay cause my union was paying the ride.

    Don’t observe too much. Don’t challenge the Doc. Don’t piss off your Mother-in-Law.

    The wife and I celebrated 40 years in June. I must be crazy about her, or something.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. The biggest problem with any attempt at a solution is that we’re up against people who are basically made of bad faith, who will twist and exploit literally anything you put in place to weaponize it, and will corrupt even the most ironclad attempt. That’s the main reason I worry about any attempt at this sort of thing, I feel like without minimizing the bad actors it’s just changing the way it will be used to club us over the head. Not sure what the good way to resolve that is, though. And I may just be getting some black pills in my meds.

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    1. And more specifically, it seems (from a cursory “survey” as much by osmosis as anything else) that the collective body and professional associations of today’s psychology are (by and large) pretty well indoctrinated, “wokerized” and “converged” — so they’re likely to be “on the wrong side” of that great divide in thought the OP mentions. Where both sides are so far from sharing a world view (or basic set of believed-facts for it to stand on) that they literally look close enough to crazy from each others’ viewpoints, before formal psychology as-such ever comes into it.

      The Covid-19 vaccines were and are both safe and effective; nationalism is resurgent Nazi-ism / Fascism and “Raising the Colors” might as well be raising the Twisted Cross; Russia Russia Russia and the 2016 (not 2020) election was blatantly stolen… these are not just beliefs but by now articles of faith. With some, of course, who we say have “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

      (Objectively, one could look closely at their recent actions / declarations / policy statements.)

      Now add to this, all those evil intentions and by-every-means-necessary principles, as stated.

      So, who will “watch the watchers” when the tradiitonal oversight organizations are so infected we’d have to find some way to “cure” them, before they can help us with the literally mentally ill?

      Obviously there are plenty of well-informed, sane psychologists. Now as in the actual Nazi era, it seems that being of the Jungian school seems to provide at least a little protection, for instance. But you’d have to make sure the positions of power and influence are (mostly) occupied by such, and it would seem to be a bit of a revolution for that to happen. Plenty of manure in our current Augean Stables, alas…

      But every Herculean feat of cleanliness starts with a single swing of the shovel.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. “… the 2016 (not 2020) election was blatantly stolen… “

        As was the 2024 election. A number of people on the left have noticed that quite a few less people voted in the 2024 election than did in the 2020 election, and have come to the only possible conclusion: Trump disenfranchised millions of Democratic voters who would have helped Harris win the White House.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. Oh, yeah, all those 18 million Biden ‘voters’ that appeared from nowhere in 2020, and then vanished without a trace after the election.

          I’m still waiting for somebody to explain how Pennsylvania counted 766,000 more mail-in ballots than were ever sent out.

          “There’s statistically improbable, and then there’s ‘violates the fundamental principles of the universe’ improbable.”

          Liked by 3 people

          1. That’s easy; 766,000 pieces of (used) toilet paper self-identified as ballots. For Dems, no problem at all.👿

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  9. What Writer and Tim said – that any kind of solution to resolve the problem of the insane homeless may almost certainly be twisted into something malign … but we’re also at the point in some localities where the problem of the utterly mad and incapable wandering around on their own can’t be endured much longer. It may be coming down to which is the less immediate of two evils.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. And then? What happens next? When the levers of power shift, it will be the conservatives who are locked up.

      Granted, there are a few on all sides who probably do need psychiatric evaluation. Wiring shorts and chemical imbalances are nonpartisan.

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  11. The weaponization has already begun. Just a few days ago there were stories of some California municipality that was proposing a “mental health exemption” for schoolgirls to get some relief from boys using their locker rooms and lavatories. In effect, they would have to declare themselves mentally ill.

    Quite the precedent to set. You have to be literally nuts to think that Nick with the lumpy trouser bulge is not as entitled to use the girls’ room as you are, or really more. I have little doubt this was done with maximum malice. “See, they admit it themselves! They need help, and I know just the place …”

    What is the way out of the Prisoner’s Dilemma that our society has become? The one or two answers I’ve come up with are about as pretty as Nick.

    Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

    Liked by 4 people

  12. While transgenders are all mentally ill, so are a huge number of people in this country, yet we don’t deny them their 2nd Amendment rights 99% of the time. In fact, in many cases, those mentally ill require the means to self-defense more than the rest of us. I went through 6 months of clinical depression when I got back from the Gulf War, yet there’s no trail of bodies behind me. The same can be said about a LOT of service members. And yes, there are some people who do want to take their guns away from them too, and with even less justification.

    About the only group of people that are blanket denied firearms are convicted felons. And they can usually only get that right back after completing their punishment and requesting it be restored. Some states require the same thing to restore voting rights.

    Frankly, if someone is such a danger that you can’t trust them with a firearm, then it is reasonable to say they are such a danger that they cannot be allowed to roam free and need to be locked up for our own safety and security. If they’re not dangerous enough for you to lock them up, then they damn well aren’t dangerous enough to be taking their guns away.

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    1. Some folks are speculating the “trans lose gun rights,” idea is to cause the Democrats to suddenly become rabid 2nd Amendment defenders.

      I think it’s Unconstitutional. But again, if the way to tell someone is insane is to let them kill people…

      I’m increasingly thinking we’re seeing real demonic possession. The translations of the Annunciation shooter strongly suggest it.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Might be doing exactly like the flag burning EO, and going “you can’t ignore these other crimes just because it’s associated with currently popular thing.”

        The “protect trans kids [by killing people]” type threats are obnoxiously mainstream.

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      2. No, ordinary prosaic human evil is more than sufficient explanation. That, and the moonbat ‘Experts!’ willfully enabling their delusions. “Pretend to be a girl! That will solve all your problems!” Only it never does.

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        1. Generally, yes. That’s what I always thought. But then I started to wonder. If a certain number of people actually were possessed by demonic entities that had nothing but jealous hatred for humanity and wanted only to cause harm, what would be different? The only thing I can think of is that maybe medication wouldn’t be able to bring them out of it. And then I applied the same thought process to the progressive left; if they were not being guided by a malevolent force that hates humanity and wants us to be miserable, what would be different? And I couldn’t think of anything.

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          1. Nearly a quarter century ago, I spent a couple of years working as security in a major hospital complex. Making sure the junkies and mentally unbalanced didn’t harm anyone was a major part of the gig.

            When I started, I had the firm belief that demonic possession was just a pre-modern rationalization of mental illness. That smug certainty was shattered by the end of the second week.

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          2. When I gaze into the dark of night and think about all the galaxies out there than I cannot possibly see without the Hubble Telescope, I cannot help but wonder how there could be a Supreme Being in such a vast universe, and why such a Being if He existed would be interested in something as insignificant as little old me.

            I have three or so reasons why I hold onto faith, though:

            First, I am convinced the human mind needs belief or faith, to keep them grounded both ways — to believe they are significant, and to believe there’s something higher than them that needs to be respected,

            Second, I have had too many experiences, and am immersed in too much research of my religion (I’m a Latter-day Saint) to be able to dismiss such belief lightly,

            and Third, I am convinced that even if there isn’t a Supreme Being, our myths and our fiction help us understand important things about the Human Condition that should not be treated lightly — things like “You don’t want Odin’s attention on you” or “people can be possessed by demons” or “The Light of Christ will guide you to do good” are among the things that help us through this mortal coil.

            Even if, in the end, I just disappear into the aether when I die, I figure that if these things guide me though life, help me understand the Human Condition, and help me teach my children and others these things as well, then it will have served me well regardless!

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            1. What egocentric arrogance prompts some people to believe that the entire universe exists for the sake of one species of smart-ass monkeys on one insignificant dust speck in one unremarkable galaxy out of a trillion, which dust speck didn’t even exist for the first 9 billion years?

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              1. One SF author had humans go out into the universe and discover plenty of Intelligent Aliens with each Alien Species having a “god”.

                Of course, that author claimed that the various “gods” had nothing to do with each other.

                But then the author never explained “how humans knew that”. It wasn’t as if the various gods actually talked with their “followers”. [Sarcastic Grin]

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              4. What kind of arrogance seeks to dictate to the one who Was Before All about His judgement calls?

                “How dare you waste your literally beyond infinite resources on Cool Stuff! Only do things that I say are important enough to do!”

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              5. I cannot rightly understand the confusion of mind which looks at the universe and somehow jumps to “I / We are insignificant” as the next appropriate thought. The two are completely unconnected concepts.

                More likely is they desperately wanted to reach that conclusion and will take any excuse for it.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. It’s like looking at a massive, elaborate tapestry, and then going “this thread is insignificant!”

                  It’s…just not the entire tapestry. And it contributes to the whole so it’s more than the sum of the parts.

                  Liked by 2 people

                    1. And one thread being a bit frayed doesn’t destroy the whole thing, but if whole bunches of them are damaged, it messes stuff up, too.

                      So just repairing a single thread MATTERS.

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              7. What egocentric arrogance prompts you to assume that faith is merely egocentric and arrogant? Especially in response to this thoughtful, well-considered comment, which allows plenty of room for you to hold your own views? Of all the unmitigated gall…

                Responses like this are the reason why, even if I were an atheist (and I was thisclose to being one for a long time), I would never call myself one. You lot are almost as annoying as vegans.

                Liked by 1 person

          3. The Screwtape Letters sound more and more like a fictionalized version of reality every day. What’s bad is for a lot of people, all it takes is a nudge, a whisper in their own minds in their own voice saying, “Nobody will know. Just do it. You want it.” Just a little each day, slowly, eroding away the conscience. After all, how much better for evil to convert than to possess? And if they convert enough, they can possess anyway.

            That’s one of the better arguments for attending services regularly, and frequently. And dedicating time for self-reflection. Confession does have a positive purpose. The trick is finding someone trustworthy enough, and strong enough, to take it. Anything to bolster your defenses against the whispers.

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      3. There’s an applicable meme in that group of granite grok links. I think it’s in the Friday one.

        I quite agree with you about the demonic possession business applied to trannies. I know it sounds nuts to those of us with a strong scientific world view, but this whole changing your identity by physical mutilation accompanied by name changing argues that there is a completely different individual taking over that person’s body.

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        1. Not just transgender.

          What made me start to wonder, besides the Annunciation “diary,” was a “meme,” someone reposted (to mock, because it’s bad). The meme: an overmuscled, stylized cartoon of “Chad Hochul!” meaning NY Gov. Hochul, saying things like, “Free meals for all our kids!” “We won’t let kids starve!” and so on. Behind her, drawn much smaller, an equally stylized cartoon of J.D. Vance, with the “puffy face,” saying something along the lines of, “Guess you’ll have to go hungry, kiddies, daddy Twump says so.”

          Aside from the total asininity of the thing, look at it: nothing original. The images and language all copied from conservative memes. I know they think they’re being very edgy and clever, but they seem to be unable to create, only to copy, badly.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. I think the majority of them are victims of social influences.

          Or at least they start out that way. Some of them might acquire a passenger or two *after* the body mutilation, and the horror starts to sink in on a subconscious level of what they’ve done to themselves. The emotional imbalances caused by the hormonal drugs that they need to take for the rest of their lives certainly don’t help matters.

          Keep in mind that there are a number of people who’ve gone all the way, including the surgery, and then come back to sanity. They can’t undo the harm that they’ve done to their own bodies. But some of them are quite active in attempting to warn others of what a disaster transgenderism is on a personal level, even while undergoing a tidal wave of attacks by the transgender movement and its supporters.

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  13. A big chunk of the problem is the old: “Something must be done! This is something. Therefore it must be done!” line.

    I’m even more skeptical about guardrails working because of how badly the guardrails of the criminal justice system are working. Even leaving aside the deep… disagreements between right and left about what is and isn’t a crime, the criminal justice system has been heavily weaponized too.

    I’m also skeptical about how well current medications actually help the schizophrenic, as opposed to making things better for the people around the medicated patient. Schizophrenics, and the mentally-ill homeless in general, are notorious for self-medicating. Yet going “off their meds” is a big issue, and I’m not seeing a huge black market in anti-psychotics. Which is what I would expect to see if anti-psychotics were as effective as claimed at actually helping the actual patient.

    If I’m going to call for anything, it’s going to be humility. Humility and caution about taking action under the banner of “But it is for their own good!”

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    1. How, exactly, would you know about anybody other than those who don’t like how they feel on meds?

      How about the established correlation with drug use preceding mental health issues, in a pattern that is stronger than family history of mental illness?

      Or the horrifically well known issue where someone is only forcibly medicated after he brutally murdered the only relative that hadn’t kicked him out to die on the street?

      As several of these poor SOBs have pointed out– who wants to take the drug to be reasonably sane when that means you live, every day, with the horrible thing you did when you were insane?

      Liked by 1 person

      1. To add, the reason why many of them go off their meds is that they’re fully aware of some of the ways that the drugs are effecting them. I used to have a friend who was bipolar. When she was taking her meds, it stabilized her. But at the same time, she could feel that her emotions were being reigned in. And she resented that, as I’m sure most of us would. So after a period of no symptoms she would stop taking her meds, which would allow the symptoms to return.

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          1. That’s a big part of the reason I quit the ADHD pills, and a friend at the time (we’ve lost touch since) said the same: the creative spark is all but smothered when you’re dosing a mandatory amphetamine.

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        2. That’s exactly the folks I meant by ‘who didn’t like how they felt on meds.’

          I have an aunt who is genuinely nuts and dangerous, was actually happy and functioning well on meds, until an activist nurse browbeat her into going off her meds because medication is oppressive.

          It’s a medication where it’s harder and harder to get a good result if you go off and back on again.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. when that means you live, every day, with the horrible thing you did when you were insane?

        Which, if you recall, was exactly Heinlein’s argument for execution regardless of mental state.

        Either he couldn’t be made well—in which case he was better dead for his own sake and for the safety of others—or he could be treated and made sane. In which case (it seemed to me) if he ever became sane enough for civilized society . . . and thought over what he had done while he was “sick”—what could be left for him but suicide? How could he live with himself? And suppose he escaped before he was cured and did the same thing again? And maybe again? How do you explain that to bereaved parents? In view of his record? I couldn’t see but one answer.

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          1. Larry Niven touched on it in, “The Ethics of Madness,” where the protagonist is a paranoid schizophrenic on meds he receives daily via an “autodoc.” When the auto doctor runs dry, he doesn’t realize it and eventually he murders his partner’s family because his partner is out to get him, he just knows it.

            In that story, the protagonist leaves Earth, having been restored to sanity…because the shock of losing his family has driven his partner mad and the partner is now seeking revenge. The protagonist is living with the memory, but it feels to him as if it was “someone else.” (Niven doesn’t say the shrinks have adjusted his meds to make him essentially a pneumonia emotionless robot, but he acts like one).

            The story does *not* have a happy ending.

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  14. How about a starting position of something like “this isn’t a crime but I say he’s clearly going to commit a crime, can we deal with this using mental health routes before he kills someone?” and copy the protections of legal proceedings?

    Because the low hanging fruit is stuff like the “it’s not mine” guy, or the brother of one of my schoolmates who was routinely chasing his mother and grandmother around with a butcher knife. At least once a month the cops would have to come help, because he got too big for when the grandfather got home, and the dad worked in a job you couldn’t go home to help from.

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      1. Do you have a point that isn’t “a scifi movie used something faintly similar in a completely different way, so we must hold on to the idiot ball”?

        I chose those examples because they are common real-life situations where anyone who actually engages with the situation is aware that they are not crimes, because the individual in question is not capable of making choices.

        They are innocent by reason of insanity.

        But, because a bunch of people decided to use movies and similar fictional narratives to make legal framework choices, they are dealt with inside of the criminal justice system.

        Including throwing the insane back out until they kill somebody, so they can…go to jail for a few years, then do it again.

        This isn’t even news, for crying out loud– part of why the criminal justice system is so packed is that the institutions got dumped into them.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. The movie is not an argument against but a suggestion to consider that you might be wrong. The examples are crimes even if the person is not guilty by reason of insanity. If they weren’t, then nothing the person did could be a crime, even murder.

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          1. Your assumption that others have no ‘considered they may be wrong’, even in cases where you are either unwilling or unable to form an argument that engages with a very simple suggestion, rather than doing the equivalent of yelling “we can’t have nuke plants, because Godzilla”, suggests you should check our own eye for log.

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          2. Which is reason why “not guilty because insane” has been changed to “Guilty but Insane”. Former lets the guilty walk. Latter puts guilty into hospital lockup, with chance to be cured and plead for release. Although there are arguments that when they then are sane, they are to be moved into prison cells for the remainder of the standard sentence, or the diagnosis continues as “cannot tell right from wrong insane life sentence”. OTOH one can argue that prison makes most people insane.

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  15. I’m not quite following some of the logic here. The commies committed all their political enemies, yes. This lead to the US mental health industry being forced away from involuntary commitment, how?

    Certainly, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was anti-involuntary-commitment propaganda (but it’s an excellent book anyway). But it is also very easy to find cases where horrific things happened not because “we don’t understand mental health” but because “we have the power to do so”. The lobotomy done on John F. Kennedy’s sister that rendered her mute for the rest of her life was simply because her father was tired of her disobeying him and defying his will. Finding that horrific has nothing to do with communists, pro or con, unless you pair it with the communist tendency to commit the opposition and denounce both as bad.

    But it doesn’t follow that “communists did it” and “the American psychiatry profession bought the communist line completely” to “therefore involuntary commitment was ended almost completely”. One would think that if it were something like that, they would have ramped it up, particularly for their religious opponents.

    There are definitely individuals who are unfit for human society. And I am abjectly opposed to giving anyone in politics, anybody at all, the power to declare “this person belongs in that class and an institution”. It will be abused, as the examples above, and countless others, demonstrate that it already and virtually always has been.

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    1. Or to put it a slightly different way:

      We cannot even begin to deal with the problem of the (relatively small number of) people who need involuntary commitment, until we first solve the problem of all the sociopaths and narcissists infesting the halls of political power, at every level, in our culture.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Because the books were written by convinced Marxists. The psychiatry books. I wasn’t so much stating the logic as the fact.
      it’s like they looked at the USSR and wanted to justify what they did. Which is possible. It’s how Western communists worked. So the fault of insanity “Alienation” was …. capitalism. Yes, the books said that explicitly.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Oh, I don’t doubt the influence. I just don’t see the cultural push away from insane asylums being especially connected to that influence, which you seemed to be saying it was. It’s actually rather fortuitous that the push happened, even with all the bad that went with it. Can you IMAGINE the Karen Brigades that would be going everywhere to commit wrongthinkers, particularly during Covid?

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        1. It appeared in so many things, that were usually “push of the left.” They still do those now. I remember when all sympathetic characters were illegal immigrants a few years ago. It just doesn’t work.

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          1. Seeing ads for the new shows. Let’s see, there’s the one about the strong female sheriff of a county somewhere back of beyond, facing down white male rednecks. (To be fair, she’s also white). And a po,ice procedural set in Boston.

            I guess I should be glad they don’t try to set series in Memphis, or Atlanta, or Huntsville.

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  17. The entire mental illness ‘thing’ is a complex mess. Yes, there are people who are “wired wrong” or experience some sort of trauma that knocks them out of reality and they deserve care and help. How to actually deliver that care is a real issue. I remember from many years ago a friend of mine who was/is a very good psychologist (really tries to help people and resolve issues) and was always having to ‘work’ the system for good results who told me there is not a definition for “sane” but sure are a lot of definitions for “not sane” many of which are social and not mental.

    I support a modest ‘something’ with a lot of bumpers to at least address the most extreme elements in the mental illness arena. Just letting them wander about until the criminal justice system has to take them in hand has not been a good or workable solution. The actual stats on mental illness officially in the case files for prisoners is huge. Most (light weight mid-western cons) of the prisoners I worked with over the years all had drug/booze etc. issues which directly connected to why they were in lock up. I always thought that a cell block wasn’t good treatment but it was all that was available.

    Now, the entire social/political noise now present is a whole additional element as basic reality (men having babies, etc.) is being denied and I sure don’t know how to ‘fix’ that or how to get reality back in control over the dis-connected ideas of the current “them” in our society. I hope and pray that reality gets put back into play and we are able to survive.

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  18. Which insane are we talking about, because there are so many out there, Rep. Crocket anyone?
    Start with those who are repeat dangerous criminals. Criminals who hurt others, if they are not sane enough to stand trial, they are not sane enough to walk the streets. If they are released by a liberal Judge, they have to live with that Liberal Judge as their legal guardian, their monetary legal guardian. The problem with Judges in this day and age is they are not responsible for their decisions. Morality becomes much clearer if you are responsible for it with your own skin and pocket book.

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    1. Hell, nobody in the government is held responsible for their decisions. No matter how stupid, irresponsible or downright malicious.

      “If there were any justice in this world, if your laws meant anything, half of your government would be in prison. Half of those would be sentenced to death for their crimes.”

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  19. In my not-so-very-humble opinion (IMNSVHO), the easy solution here is to never, never, NEVER let the left back into power. Ever. As I say, friends don’t let friends vote Democrat.

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    2. Not easy or simple. But it is the only thing that would really BE a solution to this problem (and a host of others). The Democratic Party as we know it must be eradicated from civic life.

      Liked by 2 people

  20. Sarah, the past few years have convinced the Reader that there are no guardrails high or strong enough to trust with something like this in our current environment. When a US senator from Virginia (think Jefferson and Mason) pronounces in public that our rights come from the government, and that any thought otherwise is equivalent to Iran’s theocracy, this is going to have to wait till some larger sanity is returned. For anyone who missed it – https://www.foxnews.com/media/kaine-sparks-backlash-after-calling-declaration-independences-god-given-rights-extremely-troubling

    The Reader grieves for the destruction of individuals who could be rescued with sound social policy, and the disruption of civic life associated with them. Unfortunately, he deems the defense of the rights of the rest of us to be far more important.

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  21. “What you mistake for madness is just san over-acuteness of the senses…”
    — EAP, The Telltale Heart

    EAP can mean either “Edgar Allen Poe” and “Employee Assistance Program”.

    Coincidence? I think not.

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  22. Just spitballin’ here, no grand conclusions or delusions:

    Bum culture is “a” culture. Look at it that way first, not just as a problem, a mental health problem, a drug problem, etc., even though it’s all of those and more. Homeless folk ain’t always bums. But. They live cheek by jowl with them. When your roommate has fleas, so do you. And I mean that in a more than literal sense.

    Trust evaporates faster than the last ice cream cone in 105deg weather. Suspicion is a life skill in bum culture. It can save your life. Seemingly reasonable, normal (for a bum) people can crack in an instant. But eternal vigilance is exhausting. Everybody gets screwed over eventually.

    Being around mental illness, drug addiction (can have similar symptoms), and social rejects is a social pressure. It affects you, whether you want it to or not. You don’t get solitude without a lot of work. And more work than you’d think, too.

    Getting out of the gutter is not something that’s a given, either. It is much harder to get off “assistance” than to get on it. Especially when you don’t even know what you don’t know about it. And what you do “know” is suspect.

    Painting a wee bit grim picture? Brothers and sisters, this is just the lite version. Just spitballin’ as it were. Bum culture is wedged in tight against criminal culture. Prison culture, gang culture (some overlap) are there, too.

    Stack on top of that, inner city shenanigans. Corruption, legal system failures, and agents provocateur constantly shoving against each other for an edge. Add to that the newly grown illegal immigrant culture that’s now a part of those inner cities.

    It’s a mess.

    Two things I can think of might help. But those two things are more complicated than it is just to suggest. Rule of law and consistency. Both to weed out corruption. Both to add stability. Both to give an option for those seeking to claw their way out of the gutter, despite everyone else trying to drag them back down.

    Rule of law and consistency. Tough pill to swallow for the inner city. Nigh impossible for the corrupt that want to keep power. Nigh impossible to get it going without shooting or hanging at least some of them.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Yep. But such folk tend to be fickle and cowards. When the cold winds blow, they try and cover up. Viz. the governor of DC changing her tune. Shoot a few and the rest will probably fall in line. Like it was their own idea all along.

        You can usually tell the ones what are serious. They have reasons for why they changed their tune. And they walk the walk even when the cameras aren’t rolling.

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  23. There is no blood test or X-ray for most mental illness. It’s not science at all. It’s culture and opinion. The people who have to decide if you are crazy mostly go by the testimony of family members, officials, or other health care providers who have to specialized training.

    When I was younger a family in Canton Ohio took a young woman in and wanted her committed because she said she had delusions of grandeur and claimed to be running for public office. The professionals thought it a sad case and locked her away.

    You may expect that ruined her campaign when she disappeared and was held without communications. Her campaign workers were of course not told what they’d done when they asked the family. She lost the election. The doctors never bothered to check her story or see she was registered to run in the election.

    She missed the opportunity to kill them all when she was let go. – After all, she was certifiably insane and couldn’t be held responsible for it.

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  24. As Tuco Benedicto Pacífico Juan María Ramírez said to the one armed man “When you have to shoot, shoot! Don’t stand there talking.” My sense is that the majority of people are getting pretty fed up with the homelsss and the illegals and the crime and the corruption. Instead of worrying about what may or may not happen 5 or 10 or 20 years from now, maybe conservatives should just do something productive now. My worry is that we spend so much time debating perfect solutions that things get so bad people welcome a dictator who has the fortitude to establish order.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That’s one of several reasons you got Trump 2.0. His love for this country is obvious, and he’ll do things, and learned HOW to do them in his first term.

      And he’ll admit something has failed once he sees evidence. His statement the last couple of days on vaccines? I guarantee that the first thing he had RFK Jr do is aim the DOGE AI at the records in the actual bureaucracy and found out the scale of the lies he’d been told.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. IIRC (though I never ran down the exact source personally) D. Birx The Scarf Lady actually admits she was part of that, in her Covid brag-book; though, again, that’s not nearly all of it by a long road, just some of the most personal and in-your-face of the prevarications.

        Likely the bad-guys of this piece still haven’t realized that much of the entire country is on to them, has been for a good while, and will not likely ever stop playing “Don’t Be Fooled Again” in the back of our heads in this lifetime, at least…

        Liked by 1 person

        1. You would think so, but based on some conversations with staff while Em has been in the hospital, they’ve been told that any of the side effects from the vaccines are actually the result of getting COVID, and vaccines are still encouraged.

          Neither Em nor I have authorized her getting more vaccine boosters…. but neither of us is sure they will care.

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  25. Changes to the DSMV make this a questionable solution. If I remember correctly, belief in God is now a disorder, along with a lot of other things.

    If you’re conservative, chances are good that you fit at least one criteria that would allow them to lock you up.

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  26. This has been something that has been on my mind for several years now — both because I have read “My Brother Ron”, and also because well before that book was finished, my sister was diagnosed schizophrenic.

    One of the biggest take-aways from that book is the “Danger to self or others” — and about how pretty much the only way you could be deemed a “danger” if if you’ve just stabbed or killed someone.

    That woman who believes she is dead and is slowly starving herself? (An example given in “My Brother Ron”.) According to the current “standard” she’s not a danger somehow. In the case of this woman, she starved herself to death. (This is something particularly relevant to me, because that’s how my sister started out with her diagnosis — fortunately she got to a point where she voluntarily accepted treatment!)

    That homeless guy who rants at passers-by, who threatens them, and who occasionally punches someone? Somehow it is justifiable to periodically put him in jail for a few days, and then release him, over and over again — until he goes and pushes a young woman onto the tracks of an incoming train.

    That guy who can’t stay in a homeless shelter, even though it’s freezing (and heck, even though he has an apartment that, between social security and auto-payment, remains paid for even when empty, but isn’t used because he’s convinced it’s bugged — another example from “My Brother Ron”) either because he’s paranoid to go inside, or between drug use and angry tirades, he has to be kicked out — how is this not a danger to self, even putting aside others? How many homeless froze to death because of this?

    So I would propose that a simple starting point for fixing the homeless problem, helping the mentally ill, and preventing the system from getting out of hand, is to expand “Danger to self or others” to include people who are, indeed, a danger to self or others! But it doesn’t have to be expanded greatly to have an enormous effect in both reducing homelessness and helping the mentally ill.

    I would propose that being homeless and not able to hold a job should be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for committing people against their will. If someone can wander the streets without accosting strangers, and can stay in shelters without getting kicked out (whether for using drugs or for being actively hostile to others), then that person shouldn’t be committed. A homeless, jobless person who does start doing these things — particularly if they’re getting arrested for these things, is a danger to self or others, and thus needs intervention.

    Now, for purposes of removing people off the street, I kindof don’t care whether the individual is mentally unstable because of insanity, or due to a drug-addled brain — but the first step for treating someone committed should be to check for underlying physical conditions. As Sarah has pointed out, the mind is connected to the body in funny ways. I recently encountered a story of a meth addict who had been used for “before” and “after” pictures to show how awful meth can be … only to have her appearance continue to deteriorate, even after a year of sobriety … because it turned out that she had Lupus, and her meth addiction may have been partly self-medication for that. Whether the person has schizophrenia, is drug-addled, or just has other issues, it should be considered important to find and try to treat underlying conditions first, because other treatments won’t work as well without that!

    Also, another random thought: commitment rooms should be comfortable to live in, should be “homey”, and inmates should be treated kindly. I can’t remember where I saw it, but I recently saw a study that suggests that, regardless of the mental issue, it’s far better to treat the patient in a nice environment than it is to put the person in a small, sterile, white room, which is apparently the current standard practice.

    Should someone be forced into treatment? I’m not entirely sure I can say for sure — however, I will say this: if someone is belligerent, treatment should be a requirement for transfer to a half-way house — and if the person can stop taking medication (maybe he’s come to terms with his schizophrenia, for example, and has learned what his hallucinations are, and could learn to ignore them) and still function reasonably well, then I doubt it would be productive to force the individual to continue medication. But if the person goes back to being a danger, whether or not the person is still on meds, the person should be re-committed.

    If someone is living in a home, and maybe even holding down a job, and is starting fights with strangers or making threats, that person should be considered sane, and should be charged with assault in these cases. It might be a good idea to check for underlying conditions for that individual too, though, particularly if it’s a clear personality change. But commitment should be off the table completely, unless an underlying mental illness has been clearly identified and it’s to the point where his new aggression is both related to the disease and is rising to the danger of self or others.

    Now, this is by no means a perfect solution — in particular, the people on the boundary of insanity and intelligence, who are far enough gone to decide to kill people in crowds, but still have enough sanity to plot, plan, and acquire the means to do so, will inevitably fall through the cracks — because they will usually be just outside this strengthened standard of danger of self or others.

    This is also going to miss people who lose their mind and go crazy, but don’t do so at a level to qualify as a danger to self or others — and may even refuse treatment that would be extremely helpful. Such individuals, so long as they are being cared for and have a place to stay, and aren’t hurting other people, will almost certainly slip through the cracks. Perhaps there is a way to forcibly treat such an individual without going down a route that would be easily hijacked by evil people to drug innocents — whether it’s forced by family or by bureaucrats, it’s easy to see how such can be abused by greedy and/or power-hungry people — but it may very well be the case that these people would be a “sacrifice” we have to make, to be able to commit people who clearly need committing and to leave unmolested people who are clearly sane.

    Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk! I am just a lone mathematician pretending to be a software engineer, so I don’t expect this proposal to reach the halls where it needs to be heard, but I figured that if I vented here, this proposal could at least get into a few more minds.

    And come to think of it, this post was a lot longer than I expected. Sarah, if you think this would make a good guest post, go ahead and use it! Heck, if anyone else thinks this would be a good blog post, don’t bother to ask me for permission, just use it: I think this is an important enough idea that it should be spread as far and wide as possible. Perhaps it’s not the best solution to both helping our mentally ill and preventing our psychiatric institutions from being hijacked by evil people, but I think it’s at least a good starting point!

    Liked by 1 person

  27. IDK the answer to all this. I can cite examples where there was abuse. One great-grandmother by all accounts. Because she refused to handle her household the way her father wanted (by all accounts he was a huge manipulative ass*). This meant daddy dearest would show up, make a fuss, have her dragged off to the state hospital in Salem (by all accounts one of the horrible ones). Great-grandpa would get home, find her gone, fine out she’d been committed again, get the children (4) sorted, then head north to get his wife out. By the time she passed she, by her children’s accounts (grandma) she wasn’t particularly sane in some respects (one phrase she kept saying was they were going to starve for reasons, but there was plenty of food available).

    OTOH when grandma married, she and grandpa were forced to take in a distant relative to “help with her two children” because the relative was unmarried and had to help the family. Grandma writes that she feared leaving her 4 and 2 year old with the relative, for reasons (never quite clear). Grandma would take them to the turkey barns, have them stand on specially built risers while grandma worked with the turkeys (grandpa was off overseeing road civil engineering projects). Grandma also mentioned how dangerous the turkeys were to the two small children. I remember when reading about this thinking “Wait a minute! That two year old is dad!”

    Third example I’ve mentioned before. Under today’s conditions, my uncle would have been homeless. He had violent grand mal seizures from the time he was three. He lived with grandma until it was too dangerous for her. None of his siblings could take him in. They all had young to small children. Never mind (scary as the seizures were to witness) that he would never ever had hurt anyone, let alone the nieces and nephews; he’d be appalled if it happened. But he had no control. He went from living with grandma to a group home. Eventually he had to go into a secure nursing home, then regular one. He had to be forced to go to the group home and forced to stay there (I was young but I remember the discussions, and crying by every adult; kids were left out of the process).

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  28. Unfortunately, given enough time I’m fairly confident that the Left will use mental hospitals against everyone else. I think it was when Obama was in the White House that I would occasionally see articles explaining that yet another group of mental health professionals had declared that conservatism was a mental illness.

    Or in other words, even if we don’t try and bring them back, they’ll still be used against us eventually.

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  29. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » THERE IS A DANGER TO USING DIAGNOSIS OF MADNESS TOO FREELY, AND YET…  But! It’s Madness!

  30. OT: Em is doing much better. She’s almost completely off oxygen and everything else is stabilizing; she was up and walking yesterday.

    Thank you so much for your concern and prayers. I know they helped.

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  31. I’ve been slowly reading Sowell’s BRAWL. One of the things that he points out, frequently, is without consistent enforcement of a consistent legal code, societies become tribal.

    I’m thinking the insanity epidemic needs that type of response: a focus on the behaviors with the sorting into prison vs institution happening as part of the ‘what to do’ with someone who does XYZ.

    Because I don’t see how the system of letting crazy people do whatever they feel like because they aren’t sane ends in anything other than people getting offed because they’re suspected of being not sane.

    That seems to be the real pattern; certain people being let off consistently for actions that would get a normal person locked away for years, until they finally kill people in lot jobs, just because they check a box.

    There needs to be one nation under one law.

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  32. In the beginning dealing with the insane was a local matter. Then county. Then the states. Somewhere along the way (1960s?) the Fed started contributing money as well.

    That stopped during the Reagan administration. The states turned almost all their inmate/patients loose in protest. They were too crazy to roam the streets when Federal money was coming in, but good to go if the states had to pay for it themselves.

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    1. There was a lot more going on than that. There have been court decisions that make it virtually impossible to commit someone who doesn’t want to be committed.

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  33. Likely the same egocentric arrogance which prompts some people to believe that because they see no worth in themselves or their fellow beings, no such worth exists, and the very idea that such worth might exist must be cut down and eviscerated so that no one dares challenge their oh-so-gloriously-rational existential nihilism ever again.

    At least, that would be my wager.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Yes, quite likely that. Or as Katherine Kurtz wrote of the sack and burning of one of her old-time Deryni monasteries: “The humans destroy what they do not understand.”

      Also see above: using art books in stores and libraries as makeshift privies. (Far, far above.)

      And yet, some of us have exactly the opposite reaction… good on yer, and could I help any?

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  34. My contribution is the impact of weed.

    In the last decade we’ve seen marijuana legalized in a lot of states AND the strength of it has reached its ultimate chemical limit. Seriously powerful.

    This I think is contributing to the epidemic of mental illness, since pot is well known to cause paranoid-schizophrenia.

    Whatever happens there’s going to be a need to treat these people, whose brains have been turned to mush. Bring back mental hospitals.

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  36. Well, frenz, (some of) my political opponents are insane and should be institutionalized.

    The dismissive handwave to ‘budget’ is ‘ice floes’. Which is to ignore hard headed questions about spending, in favor of supposing that some nonlinear event has fully repriced everything to make us now as desperately close to the bone as a very difficult hunter gatherer society situation.

    Insanity is in the context of culture, and crime is in the context of peace.

    Property rights, are a custom involving disputes, that by way of agriculture enables the possibility of multi-generation long term peace. (Necessary, not sufficient.) Before the whole intimate relationship between rule of law and peace consensus is considered. (Often the theoretical abstractions are treated as discrete things that cause other discrete things. What we label peace has a lot of voluntary buy in, likewise what we label rule of law. Treating them as existing in of themselves is a path that can lead to blindly ruining the persuasion side of things.)

    Crimes are stuff that people can view as wrong, which does not mean that they can be redefined ex nihilo on a tabula rasa.

    There are ways to carefully study mental abnormalities, but pathologies have to be defined in a context of culture.

    The most material way to accurately describe things is that demonic possession is a phenomena extensively recorded in many pre-Christian societies. Maybe pathological in their cultures, definitely pathological in trad mainstream American culture.

    What we have now is a situation that is karked.

    ‘Invest in mental health’, ‘address mental health’, both of these proposals now always carry the counter-questions of ‘in what way’, ‘using whom’, etc.

    It is like spending on education. If the status quo of the current spending is actually fraud, then not burning the status quo down could be a compromise between that position, and the folks who want more ‘investment’. One could value education in the abstract, and in practice consistently favor budget cuts, with the hope of forcing the dysfunctional destructive people to go somewhere else, where they might not be as harmful.

    The traditional answer is that we have psychology training programs, and the people trained by those programs are skilled workers that it makes sense to hire to do things. The basic and fundamental problem is that they were coerced into taking seriously the LGBT studies theory that prehistory held some sort of sexual utopia where male humans had intercourse with their own daughters, and that our ‘pathology’ is really ‘healthy’ in the context of that hypothetical society.

    Which is to say that we genuinely have a cultural split in the folks coming out of university, some of whom are lunatics, and pathological.

    Anyway, we have our country nationals who are not theory-alien, we have our country nationals who are theory-alien, and we have outright nationals of other countries who are still other-culture-alien. Some of category three have been improperly selected as judges, psycholgoists, etc. (Nationalized on paper, in a few cases, but nationalized while adhering to a disqualifying terrorist organization or creed.)

    We don’t even have a true scholarly consensus on what our culture even is. One, the nature of scholarship means that some well accepted evidence or ‘analysis’ is extremely old, and may actually no longer be valid. Two, government has been paying for the claims that are most expedient for what government has sought to do.

    Once again, there is evidence for inferring hope from some of the things that we don’t see. The actions not taken, that would have happened, if the opposition had some higher number of fanatic supporters.

    Once again, we probably don’t have grand sweeping remedies. Ease of theoretical summary can mask huge practical costs of implementing a grand sweeping remedy.

    We do have lots and lots of smaller narrower remedies, and there are a few that you (every given reader), know more about than the experts or the would be masterminds. Satisfice with the best answers you can find to the problems nearer you, that you understand enough to fix.

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