Topic pruned back to original post to remove thread hijacking.
Pixel.
(Wearing moderator hat)
If I had felt safety, sanctuary, and healing when I was in a state hospital, I would have stayed there until I was well. I already mistrusted doctors and the ones there were no different.
I think we need dedicated facilities for the chronically mentally ill. Too many of them wind up in prisons these days.
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Agreed, prisons are the de facto asylums in the United States. And it’s a crime.
If you commit a crime then you belong in prison regardless of mental illness. The reason there are so many of the mentally ill in prison is because these days everything is a mental illness. There are no bad people anymore, only people suffering from mental illness.
I have mixed feelings about this, while I agree more care has to be institutions/asylums are not the best of place. They used to have so much horrible care for patients in places like that, I think back to an episode I watched of The Ghost Adventures when they went to Eastern State Penitentiary, the patients in these types of places where often highly abused, or extremely neglected eventually reducing adults to wearing nothing but diapers, chaining people to beds, now I do know some patients need to be prevented from hurting themselves or other, but this was beyond simple preventative measures.
There is a reason these places have all been closing the doors, I don’t think it’s because they lack funding I think it’s because people are afraid of going to them and the way they would be treated if they went to a place like that. Most of these patients were often left off by families and completely abandoned by them, which is wrong in itself. I understand the family not knowing how to handle the family but if they were put in a place intended to care for them and this kind of thing was happening, they left the wrong people in charge and still don’t know enough to force people with Schizophrenia into institutions. I’m afraid if they opened places like these they’d just turn out to be like Eastern Sate, at least until we have more knowledge than we have now.
Malvok,
We look at this thing differently!
It sucks being mentally ill in a world where the support for mental illness is so poor; I know.
Jayster
I’ve been VERY, VERY lucky. I have always had plenty of services and support for my mental health problems. Hospitals, wards, psychiatrists, therapists, vocational programs, family therapy, day programs, support groups, clinics, employment agencies for the disabled, Voc Rehab, mental health low-income housing. And some I can’t think of right now.
Asylums if handled properly could be beneficial to many.
Some need it still.
I spent my first 8 years(almost) in and out of psychiatric hospital(around 12 times). In terms of treatment it was not good in that the prevailing attitude in the mid 70s to early 80s
was that if you were schizophrenic from a young age your life chances were severely limited. I had two long spells 1978(9 months) and 81-83(22 months) in both little to no help in rehabilitation skills were given. By the time of the latter spell I was regarded as a chronic schizophrenic and at worst a candidate for a long stay ward. I did not even have the fairly limited life skills now have. Repeated hospitalisations without much positive help beyond the medication gradually saw me become more and more institutionalised.
If it had not been for meeting my wife to be and leaving hospital with her I would probably have stayed an in patient till they started to gradually shut the big hospitals down.
This is to show the negative effects of a long stay in a psychiatric hospital during that period.
Not that community care with it’s lack of good,supportive therapy and social skills training has been a great improvement. Any advances in living skills I made were primarily due to my wife showing me the ropes when I left hospital with her .If I had stayed in hospital that help would have been very slow in coming.
That having been said there is a case for for supportive communities where people who need it can be in a safe,protective and healing environment . In both the US and UK bed closures have gone too far and community care is badly underfunded and undermanned.
Right, with family who wanted to help and who could help, we were in a position to access what services there were. Yeah, and how many times have you and I gone to jail, Nick?
Jayster
I don’t like the name Mental Asylum, but there should be a place for the severely mentally ill to go - a safe nurturing place, where healing can be administered.
Our prison system is filled with the severely mentally ill, this is not the place for them to live - It is a crying shame
What name do you propose, good friend? State hospital? Forensic unit? Something else?
Hey Greg, probably something else - but I personally can’t think of anything right now
I propose Forensic Intervention Unit.
Sounds good - the word Asylum conjures up some pretty bad images in my head
Oh yeah, me too. So does state hospital, considering I spent 4 years in one.
What about recovery unit?
I’m traveling and posting from a tablet, so I can’t find articles to back this up right now, but… A problem I keep running across in the news is homeless people who get arrested for what are essentially misdemeanors. Once in prison, they run afoul of the rules there and have their sentences increased because they function even worse in that environment than they do in society.
You have people who shouldn’t have been incarcerated in the first place winding up with long prison sentences. This wouldn’t happen if we had some sort of place we could have put them other than on the street.
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