In america a suicide hotline number is more likely to kill you than yourself, Regan was a bad person obviously but it’s a good thing the shitty mental healthcare we have isn’t another branch of the prison industrial complex. Do you have any faith in the government in doing it right? If not perhaps the left should advocate against such things. We should only be advocating for imprisonment politics if he had full control over the nation itself.

  • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]
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    8 months ago

    "there's a mental health crisis" doesn't mean retvrn.

    a huge amount of mental health issues are caused or exacerbated into disability by economic precarity. guarantees for things like housing, food, and employment are possible under a liberal regime but i have no illusions that we would get any of that from this government without incredible violence. richest country in the world and where i grew up we have an entire middle school's worth of homeless students.

    i'd love something more advanced than leeches and bloodletting but even the last-line brain surgery for depression is a goddamned coin flip and the shit along the way like SSRIs are only 30% to help and not have insufferable side effects. They might even have the serotonin hypothesis exactly backwards.

    the crisis is the combination of capitalism wanting us to die and a healthcare system that literally does not know what the problems are or how to fix them, and the only solution is illegal-to-say adventure-time

  • RyanGosling [none/use name]
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    edit-2
    8 months ago

    In america a suicide hotline number is more likely to kill you than yourself

    I highly doubt that

    And the US is still imprisoning neurodivergent people, and rowdy teenagers. The difference is that you don’t see advertisements recommending you send your children to be beaten by goons. It’s all coded to seem progressive and caring, but it’s still the same shit.

    In Florida a few years ago, two preteens escaped an abusive foster home and went on a shooting rampage. The police decried it as the result of abandoning God. I don’t think the foster home was ever investigated. Journalists never really brought up the cause of it either.

    Most people aren’t advocating for guys in white clothes showing up at night and kidnapping you because you’re depressed. They’re advocating for better access to doctors and medication and other changes to institutions and culture. The bare minimum that a lot of other countries have already met, yet the US refuses to do. It’s easier to get a gun than it is to get therapy for a lot of people.

    do you have faith in the government doing it right

    I have faith that it can be done if they choose to. Like I said, other countries have done it without a problem. The US is just unique in its evil and indifference despite being the richest country.

  • tamagotchicowboy [he/him]
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    8 months ago

    Not at all. Imprisonment under guise of mental health is way too easy to abuse, for example perhaps someone had a serious episode of a teen and is now many years later a whistleblower, rights advocate or merely the wrong minority and because of their history as a teen and HIPPA being a joke that's a sentence of life imprisonment for political reasons under a false pretense that no one will challenge successfully.

    Anyway, most of the people I've seen advocating for that just don't like seeing the neurodivergent or different in some way because it makes them feel bad, simple as.

    • bleepbloopbop [they/them]
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      edit-2
      8 months ago

      yeah honestly nothing scares me more than being imprisoned for my mental health. And I'm pretty tame really. But the threat of that is not only not helping people, its actively an impediment for getting treatment, and bringing back asylums would magnify that fear. Getting mental health treatment in a society that has involuntary commitment is a HUGE trust exercise and encourages people to lie to their doctors for fear of getting committed/put on a psych hold

  • SadSadSatellite @lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    It seems like the prisons in the US should be mental healthcare facilities. Ignoring imprisonment for unjust laws, which i know is a stretch, if you've done something bad enough to have your freedom taken away, you could probably use some mental healthcare.

    We treated psychology as a hard science before it was ready to be a soft science. They were imprisoning neurodivergents on the suggestions of psychologist that were effectively making things up that sounded plausible. Testing their ideas for the last hundred years has allowed us to figure out cognitive behavioral therapy, treatments for schizoid disorders (NOT THORAZINE), and countless other helpful ways to help the population (if we were interested in helping, that is.)

    In it's current state, psychiatry is being captured by the pharmaceutical industry. Psychopharmacology has become the standard, ignoring the fact that therapy is needed to solve the root problems during the time the meds control the symptoms. This is not to say that medication is not necessary, but it makes so much money it's viewed as the only solution for just about anything out of the ordinary.

    The old hospitals were prisons. They needed major reform, but instead we shut them down. I don't know how they would be run if they were reopened today, but if they were run as a social service by real psychologists, and not by businessmen, pharmaceutical companies, prison industry, or politicians, we migjt be able to help some of the people who no longer have the ability to help themselves.

    A few weeks ago, a homeless woman threw a large rock at my car. It put a solid dent in the fender, and we're lucky it didn't hit the windsheild. I tried to talk to her, and she just herled insults and me and kept walking away talking to herself about seemingly random paranoias. I didn't know what to do, if i called the cops they would've possibly shot her, jailed her, and then just put her out again to be exactly where she was, but worse off. So i just had to continue on with my newly dented car.

    The only thing that could help her is a well run mental health facility, but those don't exist. So what do we do?

    • FumpyAer [any, comrade/them]
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      edit-2
      8 months ago

      Sometimes abolishing a bad thing and then re-creating a better version of it later is the best call. Systems resist change with all their strength. See: cops as an example.