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.
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?
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.
This is true. To me it seems nearly hopeless with our current climate of dismantling social services to create an entirely new one.