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Originally Posted by jbrown132
Everyone of these individuals is mentally ill. The mental health system in this country is broken and until it gets fixed this will continue. We have a grandson who for several years was in and out of hospitals. He would tell his mother he was hearing voices that were telling him to do bad things. She would him to the hospital, they would keep him for a day, release him and essentially the treatment was go home, take two aspirin and call me in the morning. This went on for two years. Finally, he woke up one night and got his mother and father up and said the voices in his head were terrible and they were telling him to go out and hurt people. They took him to the fourth hospital they had tried where he was admitted. After two days they were going to release him until his father said if they did he was going to call everyone news outlet he could find and tell them the hospital was going to release their son who was threatening to kill himself and other people. The hospital keep him and after a month of intense discussions with psychiatrists and drug treatment he was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia and has been doing well for several years now. The real problem is most hospitals are no longer staffed or capable of handling mentally ill patients. They may have a small psychiatric unit and that’s it. They need to start building more psychiatric hospitals that treat these types of individuals where they are taken seriously when they are seeking help. In this case our grandson had two loving parents who would not give up. In the case in Texas, and most others this was not the case and there were red flags all over the place that were ignored by the parents and police. Until they fix this system that is broken this unfortunately will continue.
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There is a lot of merit to the points raised in the post above.
The history of that goes a long way back, but is similar in most states. De-institutionalization began in earnest in the 1970s. Minnesota, where I hail from, got the start on that from a certain court case, Welsch v. Noot (Welch being Patty Welsch, a mentally disabled young lady, and Noot being Art Noot, the Director (at the time) of the Minnesota Dept. of Public Welfare. The case claimed that Patty Welsch was not getting the services needed at her place of Residence (a Minnesota State Hospital), and that the services she needed could, and must be provided, in a community setting. Patty Welsch happened to have a developmental disability but the case later generalized into applying to persons with mental illness as well. The intent was good. There were undoubtedly people being warehoused in huge State facilities who could have been served better, as well as a lot cheaper (from Joe Taxpayer's point of view) in community-based facilities.
The problem was that it went too far, as idealism often does. Many of the large institutions in Minnesota that once housed the mentally disabled and mentally ill were either torn down or were "repurposed" for other uses, mainly prisons. Concurrently, community-based services were developed. Unfortunately, although most de-institutionalized folks could be served adequately in those community- based services, there were a number of them who could not: they were violent, or had medical needs so great that serving them in the community entailed a significant risk, or had other behaviors that put themselves or the community at risk if they were there, etc. etc. Concurrently with that there were legal decisions that mentally ill people had a RIGHT to be mentally ill (can't argue with that) but, given that, they also had the right to refuse medications, which led directly to an explosion of homelessness in Minnesota (and I assume most other states as well). It led to a big mess that in many respects was never solved: mentally disabled people who could have been adequately housed and cared for, but whose needs could not be met in the community, all of a sudden found themselves with no services at all, or who ended up being "served" in jails and prisons. And it is not an insignificant number: "In 2018, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported that 14 percent of prisoners in state and federal facilities met the criteria for having serious mental health conditions. In local jails the number was 26 percent." ("Imprisoning America's Mentally Ill", Ed Lyon, "Prison Legal News" July 20, 2022). Considering that America has an estimated 2.1 MILLION people behind bars, we're looking a a huge number of mentally ill people incarcerated in America: debatably somewhere around 500,000. And that number is just those behind those bars. How many others are still out there needing services but not getting them? And committing crimes along the way?
I think it can be accepted as a given that, if America were more conscientious in treatment of folks with mental issues, there would be fewer people out there killing other people. Unfortunately, as always, the devil is in the details. We'd be fighting a lot of idealistic but often misguided advocacy groups as well as an entrenched (by now) system whose idea of "service" is and remains totally skewed.