The Pitfalls of Changing the Civil Commitment Laws...

I wanted to start a debate on this for some time. But first consider some facts.

People complain it's not easy enough to civilly commit mentally ill people. But that doesn't seem to be the case with old age homes. People seem to complain it's too easy to put Grandma or Grandpa there. He or she was functioning so well independently, and the kids had them put their. Probably because they were after their money too, I don't know.

Changing the commitment laws wouldn't change anything, I'm sure they're more than adequate. It's just free and easy to do. They used to call that closing the barn door after the horses escaped, because it really accomplishes nothing.

And it might make things worse too. There seem to be a lot of mentally ill people in downtown Dearborn now (a suburb of Detroit, near where I live), I don't know why. People acting weird, sometimes yelling for no apparent reason, if you know what I mean. Anyway, this one lady was apparently accused of shoplifting at a store. Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. But no one really cared at that point. But she was visibly upset, talking loudly to herself, possibly mentally ill. But the Dearborn Police just called her a taxi to take her home. That's really all she needed.

Now if it was easier to commit her, they'd have to put her in a jail cell possibly. And people fearing that would be less likely to get help, which could potentially make matters worse. Just like if you let a sliver go, it can lead to infection, the same is true about mental illness. Making matters in fact much worse instead.

Thoughts? Comments?

 

The mental health system in America is the worst in the industrialized world.
The average cost of inpatient psychiatric treatment here is $2,873 per day. Meanwhile, 64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So we don't really provide mental health care to the peasantry, we simply throw them in jail. The U.S. incarcerates a larger percentage of it's population than anywhere in the industrialized world.

The Three Largest Mental Health Centers in America Are Jails

America's Mental Health Crisis Hidden Behind Bars

 

A yearlong BuzzFeed News investigation — based on interviews with 175 current and former UHS staff, including 18 executives who ran UHS hospitals; more than 120 additional interviews with patients, government investigators, and other experts; and a cache of internal documents —

A yearlong BuzzFeed News investigation — based on interviews with 175 current and former UHS staff, including 18 executives who ran UHS hospitals; more than 120 additional interviews with patients, government investigators, and other experts; and a cache of internal documents —

This is part of a BuzzFeed News Investigation. Other main stories in the series include:
Locked On The Psych Ward
A Six-Year-Old Gets Locked Up

Lock them in. Bill their insurer. Kick them out. How scores of employees and patients say America’s largest psychiatric chain turns patients into profits.

The first installment of our investigation, which ran last December, found that employees across 10 hospitals in nine states were under pressure to fill beds by almost any means, including twisting the words of people who came for help in order to make them seem suicidal.

 

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution banned slavery and involuntary servitude

Historically, state hospitals relied on unpaid patient labor to operate. For instance, in 1969 the Pennsylvania Department of Public Health found that approximately 11,900 patients in state facilities were working as unpaid laborers and that 3,300 paid staff would have to be hired to replace their labor at a cost of more than $11 million dollars!

In 1973, a federal district court ruled in (Souder v. Brennan) that patients in mental health institutions must be considered employees and paid the minimum wage required by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 whenever they performed any activity that conferred an economic benefit on an institution. Following this ruling, institutional peonage was outlawed as evidenced in Pennsylvania's Institutional Peonage Abolishment Act of 1973.

In other words, when patients no longer worked for free, the economic viability of many state institutions ceased and this led to the closing of many state hospitals. In an ironic twist, patients' unpaid labor had, for decades, helped prop up and support the existence of the very institutions that held them captive.

Lead Shoes and Institutional Peonage

 

In my younger days, we always seemed to have the village idiot, but the local community looked out for him and made sure that his house was warm and he was eating.
He always seemed happy in his somewhat different little world and all this cost nothing.
I question, what we see as progress these days.
Conform to the rules of our increasingly crazy society, or be outcast.