The Real Reason So Many Mental Hospitals Closed In The 1970S

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

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 confered an economic benefit on an institution. Following this ruling, insitutional peonage was outlawed as evidenced in the Pennsylvania's Institutional Peonage Abolishment Act of 1973.

Many assume that the advent of modern psychotropic medications was the catalyst for deinstitutionalization in the U.S. However, large numbers of patients began leaving state institutions only after new laws made unpaid patient labor illegal. 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.

Read more https://www.patdeegan.com/blog/posts/lead-shoes-and-institutional-peonage

pensfan13 · Nov 17, 2016

i lived near Marlboro state hospital in nj when it shut down. most of the patients lived in my hometown after they closed down.
most of what you said i have no issue with.
actually the only word i had a problem with was "captive"

unfortunately Marlboro is probably much easier to look up than abjoville but that is where a large number of them went.
im sure you will tell me i am wrong and i cant provide proof oh well, once again i can only say what i saw.

these people werent capable of keeping any real job. if not all of them, than most of them were very likely just getting mailbox money. i guess that is better for the economy put all those docs and nurses out of jobs and put these potentially dangerous people on the streets and give them handouts.
in case you are wondering i know they werent working because they never left their apartment except for the rare time of sitting on the front porch. mostly they would sit in their livingroom naked or in their underwear with the door wide open staring off into space. i can see why putting a broom in their hand would be dumb. they wouldnt do anything with it.
(the reason i said potentially dangerous was because if they never left their room its not like they were a threat to anyone outside...but nobody knew that for sure... there was the one guy who went into the a&p next door to the hospital after he escaped and knocked all the peanut butter and jelly off the shelves screaming that the nazis were coming to get him )

i dont know what its like in the actual hospital though i heard bad stories so maybe its a good thing they closed down, now all the violent ones can go hurt someone then get thrown in prison instead (the reason the captive word bothered me)
as for the non violent ones i am sure living under a bridge is ok, at least they can stay out of the rain.

i often wonder what happened to them when they left abjoville, there are no bridges big enough to live under in Monmouth county.

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

penguinsfan13 said:

in case you are wondering i know they werent working because they never left their apartment except for the rare time of sitting on the front porch. mostly they would sit in their livingroom naked or in their underwear with the door wide open staring off into space. i can see why putting a broom in their hand would be dumb. they wouldnt do anything with it.
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Of course they just stare into space and putting a broom in their hand would be dumb. they wouldn't do anything with it., they have had a chemical lobotomy. Drug induced anhedonia, otherwise know as "better" by psychiatry.

Was deinstitutionalization a good or bad thing, I don't know I was not there but the reason it happened was Souder v. Brennan not the new drugs like the psychiatric industry would like people to believe.

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

penguinsfan13 said:

i guess that is better for the economy put all those docs and nurses out of jobs and put these potentially dangerous people on the streets and give them handouts.
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We have a thing called due process and innocent until proven guilty, everyone is potentially dangerous.

It would absolutely be better for the economy to put all those docs and nurses out of jobs and give the mentally ill handouts.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would have advanced sufficiently by century’s end that countries like Great Britain or the United States would achieve a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.

So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.
*

Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.
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I just cringe when I here a politician say "create jobs"

soulcompromise · Nov 17, 2016

The question is: Should an institution be able to impose labor oriented activities, such as residents sweeping and mopping the mess hall or what have you, in order to teach the patients life skills?

I think that there are some good things that come from letting psychiatric patients do some minor chores. Sometimes they need to learn how to make their beds to survive outside of an institutional setting. No one makes their bed for them outside kind of a thing.

My mom has this friend who is conserved. I feel sorry for the lady. Long story short she currently lives in this institution with an 18 month limit. So she can stay there for that long and then after that she will no longer be cared for there. She will go on to possibly rent an apartment, or live in a board-n-care where she will have to have a roommate.

soulcompromise · Nov 17, 2016

I actually volunteer for an organization that helps the homeless get back on their feet by providing shelter and teaching coping skills etc. Part of what they do is cook, clean up, and other positive things. Are you pro or anti NAMI?

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

soulcompromise said:

I actually volunteer for an organization that helps the homeless get back on their feet by providing shelter and teaching coping skills etc. Part of what they do is cook, clean up, and other positive things. Are you pro or anti NAMI?
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I hate the pharma front group NAMI.

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

The system is set up so the psychiatric pharmaceutical industry makes billions but the people suffering are still on the street.

Housing First approaches are based on the concept that a homeless individual or household's first and primary need is to obtain stable housing, and that other issues that may affect the household can and should be addressed once housing is obtained. In contrast, many other programs operate from a model of "housing readiness" — that is, that an individual or household must address other issues (enrich the pharmaceutical psychiatric industry) prior to entering housing.

soulcompromise · Nov 17, 2016

TheGreatShoeScam said:

I hate the pharma front group NAMI.
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That's too bad. I thought they might be right up your alley.

soulcompromise · Nov 17, 2016

TheGreatShoeScam said:

The system is set up so the psychiatric pharmaceutical industry makes billions but the people suffering are still on the street.

Housing First approaches are based on the concept that a homeless individual or household's first and primary need is to obtain stable housing, and that other issues that may affect the household can and should be addressed once housing is obtained. In contrast, many other programs operate from a model of "housing readiness" — that is, that an individual or household must address other issues (enrich the pharmaceutical psychiatric industry) prior to entering housing.
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Fascinating. So there are a number of approaches to counseling the homeless. I think I see what you're saying. It might be true!

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

Abilify Price

2mg 30 tablets $717.30 10mg 30 tablets $717.30 20mg 30 tablets
$1,011.76

Results:

Charges were 2.5 times higher than the hospitals' reported costs to deliver care. Reimbursed amounts indicated by MarketScan were similar to the reported costs to deliver care. The average cost to deliver care was highest for Medicare and lowest for the uninsured: schizophrenia treatment, $8,509 for 11.1days and $5,707 for 7.4 days, respectively; bipolar disorder treatment, $7,593 for 9.4days and $4,356 for 5.5days; depression treatment, $6,990 for 8.4 days and $3,616 for 4.4 days; drug use disorder treatment, $4,591 for 5.2 days and $3,422 for 3.7 days; and alcohol use disorder treatment, $5,908 for 6.2 days and $4,147 for 3.8 days.

Mentally ill and homeless ?

The psychiatric industry will make more money than it takes to buy a house "treating" you then usually you are back on the street homeless till they scoop you up and enrich themselves again.

Add up the costs for inpatient and drugs it is a nice house.

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

Participants with mental illness, addictions thrive after being given apartments: five-year national study (Vancouver Sun, June 27, 2014)

soulcompromise · Nov 17, 2016

TheGreatShoeScam said:

Mentally ill and homeless ?

The psychiatric industry will make more money than it takes to buy a house "treating" you then usually you are back on the street homeless till they scoop you up and enrich themselves again.
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I see. So there is a sense of recidivism when it comes to organizations like the one I volunteer for.

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

Stay away from NAMI !!

In 2004, NAMI opposed the placement of "black box" warnings on antidepressants determined to cause suicide in under-18 year olds, and in 2006 opposed black box warnings on ADHD drugs causing heart attack, stroke and sudden death in children in 2006. Despite overwhelming evidence of serious adverse cardiac events and sudden deaths caused by ADHD drugs, in 2006 NAMI took the position that the “black box” warning on ADHD drugs was “premature.”

Read more http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Alliance_on_Mental_Illness

And that is an old article NAMI was all about "child bipolar" and all in on the Risperdal scandal.

Over the course of 20 years, Johnson & Johnson created a powerful drug, promoted it illegally to children and the elderly, covered up the side effects and made billions of dollars. This is the inside story.
By Steven Brill

NAMI is the Devil dressed up as Mary Poppins.

Meliai · Nov 17, 2016

Interesting.

I wonder how many of the mentally ill who were released from care later ended up in for profit prisons working for free.

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

soulcompromise said:

I see. So there is a sense of recidivism when it comes to organizations like the one I volunteer for.
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If you work for NAMI otherwise known as the pharmaceutical industry, they need recidivism to keep the cash coming in.

I was abused inpatient, NAMI can go to hell and take their pharma and Universal Health servicers money with them.

This is more what I do https://watchinguhs.wordpress.com/

To much abuse, it needs to stop.

soulcompromise · Nov 17, 2016

TheGreatShoeScam said:

Stay away from NAMI !!

In 2004, NAMI opposed the placement of "black box" warnings on antidepressants determined to cause suicide in under-18 year olds, and in 2006 opposed black box warnings on ADHD drugs causing heart attack, stroke and sudden death in children in 2006. Despite overwhelming evidence of serious adverse cardiac events and sudden deaths caused by ADHD drugs, in 2006 NAMI took the position that the “black box” warning on ADHD drugs was “premature.”

Read more http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Alliance_on_Mental_Illness

And that is an old article NAMI was all about "child bipolar" and all in on the Risperdal scandal.

Over the course of 20 years, Johnson & Johnson created a powerful drug, promoted it illegally to children and the elderly, covered up the side effects and made billions of dollars. This is the inside story.
By Steven Brill

NAMI is the Devil dressed up as Mary Poppins.
Click to expand...

Aren't there a number of similar advocacy for the mentally ill groups? Maybe there are some good and some bad. All I know is if I'm mentally ill, I hope there is some National Alliance on Mental Illness or something to help my family and I obtain information about our situation.

I see that you have a good head on your shoulders ShoeScam. I don't know enough about this to dissect it with you though. Congrats on knowing your stuff!

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

Meliai said:

Interesting.

I wonder how many of the mentally ill who were released from care later ended up in for profit prisons working for free.
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Great point !

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

soulcompromise said:

Aren't there a number of similar advocacy for the mentally ill groups? Maybe there are some good and some bad. All I know is if I'm mentally ill, I hope there is some National Alliance on Mental Illness or something to help my family and I obtain information about our situation.

I see that you have a good head on your shoulders ShoeScam. I don't know enough about this to dissect it with you though. Congrats on knowing your stuff!
Click to expand...

You DO NOT want NAMI talking to your family.

They will tell your family that if you don't like your pills it is not because of side effects like

lack of motivation, weight gain, increased appetite;

headache, dizziness, drowsiness, feeling tired or restless;

problems with speech or memory;

tremors or shaking, numbness or tingly feeling;

changes in personality;

dry mouth, or increased salivation;

They will your family you have "Anosognosia" lack of insight into how much you 'need' to be medicated into zombie oblivion and THEN give your family all kinds of help in getting psychiatry and the courts to force you to take the drugs.

NAMI gets its money from the pharmaceutical industry , In the case of Lilly, at least, "funding" took more than one form. Jerry Radke, a Lilly executive, WAS "on loan" to NAMI, working out of the organization's headquarters. They explain the cozy-seeming arrangement by saying, "[Lilly] pays his salary, but he does not report to them, and he is not involved in meetings we have with [them]." They characterized Radke's role at NAMI as "strategic planning."

TheGreatShoeScam · Nov 17, 2016

soulcompromise said:

The question is: Should an institution be able to impose labor oriented activities, such as residents sweeping and mopping the mess hall or what have you, in order to teach the patients life skills?

I think that there are some good things that come from letting psychiatric patients do some minor chores. Sometimes they need to learn how to make their beds to survive outside of an institutional setting. No one makes their bed for them outside kind of a thing.

My mom has this friend who is conserved. I feel sorry for the lady. Long story short she currently lives in this institution with an 18 month limit. So she can stay there for that long and then after that she will no longer be cared for there. She will go on to possibly rent an apartment, or live in a board-n-care where she will have to have a roommate.
Click to expand...

I think if the doors are not locked any institution should be able to impose labor oriented activities cause if you don't like it you can just walk out.

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