Why did Psychiatric hospitals stop being used?

It seems like it would be better to have mentally ill homeless people in asylums instead of the inner city. Why did Europe/North America stop using them?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Rich people don't wanna pay for something that doesnt directly impact them

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      you are directly impacted by having poor insane people no longer visible

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why do they look so damn comfy bros?

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    mostly because of all the horrific shit they became associated with them so it was easier to just get them shut down instead of reforming them and just hope the local areas can deal with the schizos, of course later on people realized it would have been better to reform them since now crack heads are everywhere

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Sad!

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      might be an eventual self correcting problem to some degree with fentanyl's death counts per year

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    A guy made a movie about how the mentally ill are fun wacky guys being tortured for the amusement of the asylum staff.
    NPC's bought it and voted to abolish asylums.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It was real. Some of the stuff that actually happened couldn't be shown on film.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      To be fair, the latter half of that was absolutely commonplace, especially in an era before CCTV cameras watching every room became an industry standard.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Institutionalization was considered cruel and inhumane, depriving people of their rights and autonomy, and many shrinks thought that mainstreaming mental patients into the community was better for them.

    There’s a myth that “Reagan shut down all the mental hospitals and kicked people out into the streets!!” but he did nothing of the sort, either as president or governor of California. The movement to shut down institutions was mostly a liberal humanistic one, and seemed reasonable as most of the places were hellish snake pits.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Anti Psychotics and SSRI's.
    Back before the 80's, there wasnt much you could do for the worst of the schizos and psychotics other than collect them all in one place and make sure they didnt hurt themselves or others. With medication, the usefullness and most importantly, profitability of asylums went waaaaaaaaay down.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This. The 50s and 60s saw the development of more effective psychiatric treatments that meant literal schizos could now lead functional lives.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      this but asylums were never profitable to begin with, closing them with the development of psych meds was purely a cost-cutting measure but started the endless battle between "take your meds" and "we can't legally force you to take your meds". at best this meant that families had to deal with their mentally ill relatives at home again, at worst it meant that the truly irredeemable were cast out onto the street to wander through their psychosis while the sane pretended they weren't there. that or we hide the truly insane in hospital wards and prisons, neither of which are equipped to deal with them, and we congratulate ourselves on our humane and enlightened closing of the asylums

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        asylums had rampant abuses in them

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          yeah, after their budgets had been relentlessly cut. they didn't start out that way, and the "humane" closure was a way for authorities to duck responsibility for the results of their parsimony

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >they didn't start out that way
            i'm curious what year you think Asylums started in.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          So clearly the solution was to close the asylums and turn thier patients out into the street where they can eat each others faces in a McDonald's car park, instead of reforming the staff.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            The homeless issue is a policing problem. You could send them to prison because eating faces is a crime. You don't need to retroactively lock people away because they are weird and therefore have a potential to do something you don't like.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            why do you think the only options for dealing with unstable people are to preemptively imprison them or to leave them entirely to their own devices.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    JFK cut their funding because liberals thought that welfare would make mental illness go away

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They are still used. I work at one. The goal isn't to just keep people there indefinitely anymore. Many of them have a time limit on how long people can stay. Some people are essentially impossible to rehabilitate and so are bounced around from facility to facility until they die, or end up in a residential home where everyone forgets they exist.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      sorry lol, mental illness doesn't exist, take your pills and welfare and shut up lol

      trust the science, people aren't born with debilitating disorders lol take your pi-pi's *rattles pill bottle*

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        You're moronic homie.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          this is honestly what they believe, mental illness was going to go away will pills and welfare. They're communists mixed with utopians, trust the science, take your pipis and shut the frick up
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Simonianism

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Because of institutional inefficiencies. Asylums are not nice places, not particularly effective places, and not particularly cost efficient places. In theory, you let most people out of the asylums and put them into supported housing and, if necessary, on welfare. Then if they're recovering they can build something of an independent life. In practice, the funding was there for the health system and isn't there for public housing or welfare.
    Think in British terms for a moment to illustrate the dilemma: You move patients from NHS asylums to council housing and social care. The NHS is very politically popular, has a strong principle of being free at the point of need, and is assured of an okay budget, while councils tend to be associated with waste, incompetence, and the stupid unfair council tax that nobody likes paying. It's almost certainly cheaper and more humane to care for people in their own homes, but you can't really do a neat transfer from the asylum budget to the care in the community budget. Instead, you add additional expenditure requests on to the local council's budget - and the council will do the absolute legal minimum, if not lower, because the mentally ill and the disabled aren't a powerful voting bloc and you're more likely to lose re-election over reduced bin collection in the suburbs than you are to one or two extra homeless on the high street. (Also, the council is free to charge for social services - unlike the NHS.)

    Worse yet, these reforms were discussed for a long time but only implemented under Thatcher, for whom controlling government spending was a high priority. So as well as not being able to reallocate the money effectively, you also run into the problem that everyone, everywhere is facing budget cuts. The NHS can save money by shutting the asylums, the local authorities can save money by shirking their duty to those released from the asylums...

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I'm willing to bet it wasn't thatcher that shut down asylums and she gets blamed for it just like reagan. The amount of butthurt she causes in British numales leads me to believe she was actually based

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        The general idea of community care had been around in official circles long before Thatcher was in power, so she's not really "blamed" for it. We don't have this general idea that it was a bad thing (or the cultural image of the asylum in general) that Americans do. Maybe because the system works a little better here, maybe because we removed the legal distinction between "asylums" and "hospitals" in the 1950s, and also sent some disabled people to similar institutions. Skimread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_in_the_Community , it's quite interesting.

        Thinking Thatcher was based because of who hates her is the midwit position, but if you want that story you should read "The Rise and Fall of the British Nation" by David Edgerton. (Actually, you should read it anyway. It's good at tearing down the idealization of Labour governments and the myths of interwar Britain too.)

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They call them "group homes" now.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Would it be better to get them addicted to video games instead?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Virtually everyone who claims that "video games/TV/movies made me do X" is a lying parasitic sack of shit trying to avoid being held responsible for their actions.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        You're an immature child.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Not that guy but he’s right anyone that cannot separate fiction from reality is obviously mentally unstable to begin with and the only reason violent video games and other media are used as a scapegoat is that it allows politicians to get away with ignoring mental health reform and allow the public to feel less guilty about ignoring signs of mental instability

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They are still used. You just can't send people away forever if they haven't committed a crime, and if they haven't done that they probably aren't that insane.

  13. 1 year ago
    Radiochan

    Psych hospitals still exist, it's that long term care is both comparatively rare and expensive.
    Also movies like One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Conservatives had them shut down to save money then blamed liberals where the cost was delegated down to the average citizen dealing with lunatics wandering the streets gibbering nonsense

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