They Called for Help. They’d Always Regret It.

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From The Atlantic: “Carlos and Christian weren’t just unlucky. They’re representative of a decades-long pattern of filling up jails with ‘mentally ill’ people. When policy makers began closing state-run psychiatric hospitals in the 1950s, they promised to replace them with localized mental-health care—but in most places the funding and political will required to make this happen never materialized, leaving large swaths of the U.S. without any options for those seeking treatment. A conservative estimate says 900,000 people with ‘mental illness’ end up in our jails every year . . .

The moment their family members called 911, both Carlos and Christian became unwitting players in a system that is massive, complicated, and, according to many experts, manifestly broken. Both families would come to regret the decision to call the police for help, and Christian would not survive. ‘We were blind to the fact that something could happen to our son in that jail,’ Jose told me. ‘Completely blind.'”

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5 COMMENTS

  1. The underlying ideology utilized by most societies concept of changing “undesired behavior” is to agree seriously with the Army General yelling, “the beatings will continue until morale improves!”

    From childhood we are taught that hurting/punishing people is what is done if they don’t behave how they are expected.

    Everyone forcibly jailing (hospitalizing) another person recognizes it’s a form of punishment that causes direct harm. Sure, they rationalize that hurting and taking away the rights of people labeled defective and who “lack insight” is the actually the heroic thing to do. But that is simply, “the beatings will continue until morale improves” superimposed with vapid egotistical justifications.

    If you go to a psychiatrist and get a psych diagnosis it means society has now defined you as so “genetically/mentally/biologically defective” that you deserve less rights than criminals. Doesn’t matter if there is no evidence. Forcibly jailed, drugged and stigmatized. Since society believes in “beatings build character” it doesn’t dawn on people how a social wide curb stomping could be detrimental to someone’s well being and future.

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  2. “‘These are people who are not necessarily intending to perform criminal acts,’ Christine Montross, a psychiatrist and author of Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration, told me.”

    “necessarily”.

    Ohh those nice appropriate psychiatric “hospitals”. The great alternative to jails where iron chains are replaced with straps, injections and pills. The chemical restraints are a great solution, a humane solution. An invisible solution for everyone except psychiatry. They, more than anyone knows exactly what they do for a living.
    So much more respectable than the criminal clients that come in.

    Punishing people for becoming displaced throughout generations of one hardship or another.

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