They got shut down because they're scary and horrible, but that's because being surrounded by people with mental illness is scary and horrible.
Anyone who has worked with the chronically and particularly violently mentally ill has absolute horror stories. My girlfriend a long time ago I worked at an old folks home and even just the violently demented ensured she constantly came home covered in bruises. She's not alone, and 80 year olds with dementia are far from the most dangerous.
Problem is that a lot of time the postmodernists mistake the system containing the horror for the horror itself. They thought that containing the insane in asylums was causing the conditions around the insane to be bad, but often it's the insanity itself that causes the conditions and the difference is whether you contain the horror or force it into the streets.
The postmodernists criticized the asylums as "social control" or places that "crush individuality" and they were both. But the dangerously mentally ill need to be socially controlled, and if your individualistic impulse is to destroy yourself and hurt others in the process, then or course that form if individuality needs to be suppressed. The guy who murdered that Ukrainian refugee recently; let's assume he was actually mentally ill. Maybe he was. He was arrested for violent conduct 14 times before committing murder. I tend to think his 15 victims would be prefer that guy have been socially controlled and had his individuality suppressed.
They would argue that asylums existed to protect society from having to confront madness, and they were probably right, but the thing is that's actually a public good in many cases. Of course things get blurry where maybe someone is just a harmless eccentric, and maybe some people who end up in those institutions are just harmless eccentrics and would be better off living at home with their families. That's more a problem of implementation than the problem of fundamental constitution.
Some people might claim that the problem is that it would take too much money to build a mental health system that includes asylums to lock up the sickest individuals. I don't think so it all because fortunately we are living in an era of unprecedented government spending. The mental asylums were totally possible and in fact implemented back when the government represented 3% to 5% of gdp, so the money is there. Moreover, if we end up locking up people like please individuals who end up getting arrested 100 times for violent crimes, think about all of the different public services who will require less money because they aren't having to do the job of the mental asylum poorly.
Another part of the reason it was assumed mental asylums could go away was a modernist belief in "better living through chemistry" -- that the new anti-psychotic drugs would be powerful enough that people who previously needed to live in a mental asylum could we let go to live as they pleased. Sometimes the models just don't work out and that's what happened here. We know that many people who might be able to live normal lives end up not taking their medication because some of the side effects are horrible and without the drugs everything comes back in full force.
In the famous novel and movie One flew over the cuckoo's nest, nurse ratched is portrayed as being purely evil. But consider this: how many bones did she have broken over the course of her career? How many bruises? How many times did she see the grim reapers blade at her neck? Of course under such a situation such a person would become hard. It's not because they are a bad person or that they started off as wanting to hurt anyone, it's because they know full well if you don't keep such people under strict control you're going to lose control and you might lose your life. Someone coming in with their liberal arts education might think that if they just come in and treat the psychopaths like a human for the first time they will be magically cured -- and that might be the case for some of the fringe cases, but in reality virtually everyone who ends up in the system has had someone that cared about them once and had to make a tough decision to let them go because the alternative was facing the violence alone.
I really want to double down on this one idea: people will go into a mental asylum and hear the screaming and hear the moans and assume that the problem is that the institution is evil. In a sense, it is actually the mental illness that is evil. Many of those people who wail in a padded cell just end up wailing in the street. Many of those people who end up attacking their nurses would end up attacking innocent people in the street. The sounds of a mental asylum sound like hell because to live with extreme and chronic mental illness is hell. The people who do that service for society shouldn't be judged as inhuman for the sin of being around people whose mental illness has made them inhuman, they should be elevated and honored for the undignified, dirty, dangerous, horrible work that they would end up doing to protect the rest of society from the hell within the walls of the asylum. We honor firefighters who run into a burning building in spite of the fact that the burning building is a little slice of hell that causes indescribable harm to the people caught within, we don't ban firefighters because we blame them for the destruction of the fire.
I have a 3-year-old. The person who was watching him the other day saw him trip and scrape his leg, and chose not to clean out the wound because when you clean out the wound on the three year old the three year old screams bloody murder and you feel terrible about it. As a direct result, the three year old now has a moderately infected scrape on their skin that is not healing as well as it would have and is causing constant pain. To be a good parent or to be a good caregiver for a child, there are times that you need to do something that is going to cause them to scream bloody murder in the short term but sometimes as soon as a few minutes later they'll be just fine. This isn't to say that someone with chronic mental illness and a toddler who scraped his knee are the same, but is this society we have decided to live in the aesthetic world where we can pretend anything that looks uglier must be the worse thing to do. Our society would prefer we don't clean the wounds of our toddlers with a scraped knees, because it keeps the toddlers quiet in the moment. It's not healthy in the long term though, and you could end up with an infected wound that could end up scarring forever.
In the end, it is true that there are multiple competing truths that are in some ways mutually exclusive but must be navigated nonetheless. On the balance, I think that it makes perfect sense for us to bring back insane asylums, and make that investment in dealing with an uncomfortable but very real part of our society rather than choosing not to.
Anyone who has worked with the chronically and particularly violently mentally ill has absolute horror stories. My girlfriend a long time ago I worked at an old folks home and even just the violently demented ensured she constantly came home covered in bruises. She's not alone, and 80 year olds with dementia are far from the most dangerous.
Problem is that a lot of time the postmodernists mistake the system containing the horror for the horror itself. They thought that containing the insane in asylums was causing the conditions around the insane to be bad, but often it's the insanity itself that causes the conditions and the difference is whether you contain the horror or force it into the streets.
The postmodernists criticized the asylums as "social control" or places that "crush individuality" and they were both. But the dangerously mentally ill need to be socially controlled, and if your individualistic impulse is to destroy yourself and hurt others in the process, then or course that form if individuality needs to be suppressed. The guy who murdered that Ukrainian refugee recently; let's assume he was actually mentally ill. Maybe he was. He was arrested for violent conduct 14 times before committing murder. I tend to think his 15 victims would be prefer that guy have been socially controlled and had his individuality suppressed.
They would argue that asylums existed to protect society from having to confront madness, and they were probably right, but the thing is that's actually a public good in many cases. Of course things get blurry where maybe someone is just a harmless eccentric, and maybe some people who end up in those institutions are just harmless eccentrics and would be better off living at home with their families. That's more a problem of implementation than the problem of fundamental constitution.
Some people might claim that the problem is that it would take too much money to build a mental health system that includes asylums to lock up the sickest individuals. I don't think so it all because fortunately we are living in an era of unprecedented government spending. The mental asylums were totally possible and in fact implemented back when the government represented 3% to 5% of gdp, so the money is there. Moreover, if we end up locking up people like please individuals who end up getting arrested 100 times for violent crimes, think about all of the different public services who will require less money because they aren't having to do the job of the mental asylum poorly.
Another part of the reason it was assumed mental asylums could go away was a modernist belief in "better living through chemistry" -- that the new anti-psychotic drugs would be powerful enough that people who previously needed to live in a mental asylum could we let go to live as they pleased. Sometimes the models just don't work out and that's what happened here. We know that many people who might be able to live normal lives end up not taking their medication because some of the side effects are horrible and without the drugs everything comes back in full force.
In the famous novel and movie One flew over the cuckoo's nest, nurse ratched is portrayed as being purely evil. But consider this: how many bones did she have broken over the course of her career? How many bruises? How many times did she see the grim reapers blade at her neck? Of course under such a situation such a person would become hard. It's not because they are a bad person or that they started off as wanting to hurt anyone, it's because they know full well if you don't keep such people under strict control you're going to lose control and you might lose your life. Someone coming in with their liberal arts education might think that if they just come in and treat the psychopaths like a human for the first time they will be magically cured -- and that might be the case for some of the fringe cases, but in reality virtually everyone who ends up in the system has had someone that cared about them once and had to make a tough decision to let them go because the alternative was facing the violence alone.
I really want to double down on this one idea: people will go into a mental asylum and hear the screaming and hear the moans and assume that the problem is that the institution is evil. In a sense, it is actually the mental illness that is evil. Many of those people who wail in a padded cell just end up wailing in the street. Many of those people who end up attacking their nurses would end up attacking innocent people in the street. The sounds of a mental asylum sound like hell because to live with extreme and chronic mental illness is hell. The people who do that service for society shouldn't be judged as inhuman for the sin of being around people whose mental illness has made them inhuman, they should be elevated and honored for the undignified, dirty, dangerous, horrible work that they would end up doing to protect the rest of society from the hell within the walls of the asylum. We honor firefighters who run into a burning building in spite of the fact that the burning building is a little slice of hell that causes indescribable harm to the people caught within, we don't ban firefighters because we blame them for the destruction of the fire.
I have a 3-year-old. The person who was watching him the other day saw him trip and scrape his leg, and chose not to clean out the wound because when you clean out the wound on the three year old the three year old screams bloody murder and you feel terrible about it. As a direct result, the three year old now has a moderately infected scrape on their skin that is not healing as well as it would have and is causing constant pain. To be a good parent or to be a good caregiver for a child, there are times that you need to do something that is going to cause them to scream bloody murder in the short term but sometimes as soon as a few minutes later they'll be just fine. This isn't to say that someone with chronic mental illness and a toddler who scraped his knee are the same, but is this society we have decided to live in the aesthetic world where we can pretend anything that looks uglier must be the worse thing to do. Our society would prefer we don't clean the wounds of our toddlers with a scraped knees, because it keeps the toddlers quiet in the moment. It's not healthy in the long term though, and you could end up with an infected wound that could end up scarring forever.
In the end, it is true that there are multiple competing truths that are in some ways mutually exclusive but must be navigated nonetheless. On the balance, I think that it makes perfect sense for us to bring back insane asylums, and make that investment in dealing with an uncomfortable but very real part of our society rather than choosing not to.
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