Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben E Lou
More accurately, we're not willing to start locking people up on such a hunch.
Some of you may recall that years ago I posted on here about a former YL kid who had committed suicide. At the time I posted, it seemed "too early" to talk negatively about him or say my real feelings on the subject. But the truth of the matter is that the kid was very obviously very mentally ill. (And yes, his parents tried numerous ways to get help but weren't willing to have him involuntarily committed.) To be perfectly honest, my first internal response when I heard the news was: "I'm surprised that he didn't take anyone else with him." I'm not an expert, but well before the suicide, there was absolutely no question in my mind that the right and moral thing to do, both for his own safety and for the good of society, was to lock that guy up somewhere safe until he could be cured.
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My wife is a mental health RN working at a transitional care facility for the seriously mentally ill -- sort of a holding area for people who are bouncing back and forth between the state hospital and managed care housing. She has the interesting perspective that she's also a med-compliant bipolar patient (manic-depressive for those of you in your 60's and 70's.)
She tells me that the biggest problem with the mental health system from the perspective of her clients is that unless the legal system gets involved, they can't compel the seriously mentally ill to be med compliant...and the legal system really doesn't want to be involved. She's more than ready for the pendulum to swing back the other direction where medical personnel can force some categories of patients into chemical restraint for the long term.
In her words, some people are beyond help, and the only way they eventually get "help" (where we define "help" as removing them from society) is to hurt other people to the point that the legal system is forced to take notice. Since I don't work in the field, it's hard for me to tell how serious she is, and how much is just frustration from working with a difficult clientele, but it seems to me that part of the issue was a national decision that was made several years ago to eliminate a great many of the psychiatric state hospitals and start pushing some of the seriously mentally ill back into their communities to integrate with the population. The resources to monitor them simply are not there, and it puts the onus on the sick individual and their family to make things happen.
I don't know about you, but I've been around enough mentally ill folks over the years that with most of them, I completely lost interest in helping them and started saying, "You know what? I don't really care what you do -- you're just not welcome to do it in my vicinity anymore." And I don't think I'm alone. I tend to believe that more and more people are more or less abandoning their mentally ill relatives to their own devices because they're *tired*, and getting them the help they need on a regular basis is a full time job.
Hell, if my wife decided to go off the deep end again and chose to be non-compliant with her treatment, our contact would last just about long enough for me to pack up my shit and the kids before heading for the hills. I've been through it too many times, and it's just exhausting.