I agree with you it is a major dilemma when you have a situation where someone is stuck in a pattern that is essentially self harm and a cry for help, but they refuse help. I’ve actually been dealing with an ongoing similar situation for an immediate family member.
I’m the last one that they have contact with. I’ve spent my life begging them to get help. I say this not as a judgment for any other person’s situation, but in my case it felt like starting from a very young age, I spent most of my life trying to save somebody who was supposed to be the adult in the situation, but emotionally they were an angry child lashing out at every one who activated them. It didn’t matter what I did or how hard I tried, I just never could help them or convince them to get help.
It took me going to therapy to even realize that it didn’t matter how many times I kept throwing a life preserver, they were just going to keep batting it away. That was part of their mental health issue and the continuous cycle. In my case they preferred to just have someone drown with them because they were too scared to get help/hear the truth I guess.
Anyway, it got to the point it became detrimental to my own physical and mental health. I still do what I can, but I basically had to just accept that I’m an adult now with my own life and other responsibilities, and I couldn’t keep doing this to myself or my family for somebody who I was essentially enabling by dropping everything and rushing to their rescue over and over.
It absolutely breaks my heart to think about it, but the honest answer is, it’s a shitty situation and there isn’t a good answer at the moment. However, if there is a solution, it’s not going to be a cheap or easy one.
Even in the case of my family member, I feel safer with them taking the risk of being on the streets than I would if they were locked away in institution that has an incentive to keep people mentally ill forever with no oversight for human rights, and no standard of care.
I talked to a case worker not that long ago who said she had a patient who had been in a full blown state of psychosis for months with no help. I know how frighteningly fucked the medical system (which was never great to begin with) is in this country right now. There is no help or even getting better for most health issues. Mental health was always at the bottom of a broken healthcare totem pole even before Trump 2.0.
It’s just another continuous cycle where conservatives yanked funding and fired everyone or got them to quit from rather than keep banging their heads against a wall trying to help people with resources that no longer exist.
Now people are just shuffled from place to place with no chance of actually getting anything resembling help until they’re sent to the ER for an actual life and death emergency. If they survive, they’re just released back on to the streets. It’s a very expensive and worthless cycle, and the people that caused it love to claim it’s evidence that Medicaid is unsustainable. Soon they’ll probably be claiming it’s also evidence it would just be cheaper and better for everyone if they could just lock people up and throw away the key.
That’s what’s so absolutely fucked about all this. It’s not that they want people off the street because they want to help them. They’re making it easier to just lock people away for life, while simultaneously making more cuts for mental health, substance abuse, and housing assistance than ever before.
It’s their same approach to solving crime. It’s not a solution to just lock all poor people up so that there aren’t any more people desperate enough to commit crime. It doesn’t solve any of the complex social issues that are driving crime, addiction, or mental health problems, and often the people making these policies have an added incentive due to their own investments in the entire fucked up system they’ve created.
The more you jam pack private prisons/detention centers/institutions, the more their stock goes up. And it’s so fucking sneaky and evil how many fucking different ways they’ve figured out how to capitalize on the problem and prey on people who need help instead of actually just trying to help them.
It’s not even just private prisons anymore. Now it’s also the fucking transportation companies to and from the prisons. It’s the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the expensive patented medications that doctors are pressured to prescribe to patients when they’re institutionalized.
I literally wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are oligarchs hedging their bets on Trump’s executive order to make it easier to lock people up for mental illness. They’re probably buying up stock in hospital beds and whatever company makes straps to keep people restrained.
They think that there’s nothing wrong with this. That they’re just being smart/good at business by backing the policy that’s destroying lives, and that they’re actually “helping people” by taking them somewhere else where society doesn’t have to see them or think about them. Out of sight. Out of mind.
I think that the day we start locking up these callous, wealth hoarding, manipulative, narcissistic, predatory psychopaths away from the rest of society and forcing them to get treatment, maybe we can start talking about locking up everyone else against their will for obvious mental health problems they refuse to address.
That’s what it really is. The same old saying that a poor person with mental illness is a burden to society while a rich person with mental illness can be an eccentric. Except the eccentrics have been allowed to take over the government, and they’ve started capitalizing on their ability to do harm to others. The “eccentrics” who claim that their callous and unemotional behavior is what makes them so great at the game of life, even as they continue to pose the most obvious threat to society compared to the “crazy people” they want to lock away.
All true, and incentive to fix what’s wrong with the system, but we can’t fix it in it’s current state, it needs billions in investment to reverse the damage caused by Reagan that turned people loose in the streets in the first place.
Locally, in my town? I think a billion would cover it.
We need a no questions asked hospital for medical care and a no questions asked mental health/addiction clinic. Get everyone the treatment they need. If they need permanent care, provide permanent care.
If folks are physically and mentally fit (or when they become physically and mentally fit), they need an agency for job training and placement and housing assistance. Provide email, address and phone service, as well as laundry assistance. Job and interview training.
There also need to be specialists on the job and housing sides too who deal with people with criminal records.
Speaking of, people with open warrants or actively committing crimes need to go through the criminal justice system.
I agree with you it is a major dilemma when you have a situation where someone is stuck in a pattern that is essentially self harm and a cry for help, but they refuse help. I’ve actually been dealing with an ongoing similar situation for an immediate family member.
I’m the last one that they have contact with. I’ve spent my life begging them to get help. I say this not as a judgment for any other person’s situation, but in my case it felt like starting from a very young age, I spent most of my life trying to save somebody who was supposed to be the adult in the situation, but emotionally they were an angry child lashing out at every one who activated them. It didn’t matter what I did or how hard I tried, I just never could help them or convince them to get help.
It took me going to therapy to even realize that it didn’t matter how many times I kept throwing a life preserver, they were just going to keep batting it away. That was part of their mental health issue and the continuous cycle. In my case they preferred to just have someone drown with them because they were too scared to get help/hear the truth I guess.
Anyway, it got to the point it became detrimental to my own physical and mental health. I still do what I can, but I basically had to just accept that I’m an adult now with my own life and other responsibilities, and I couldn’t keep doing this to myself or my family for somebody who I was essentially enabling by dropping everything and rushing to their rescue over and over.
It absolutely breaks my heart to think about it, but the honest answer is, it’s a shitty situation and there isn’t a good answer at the moment. However, if there is a solution, it’s not going to be a cheap or easy one.
Even in the case of my family member, I feel safer with them taking the risk of being on the streets than I would if they were locked away in institution that has an incentive to keep people mentally ill forever with no oversight for human rights, and no standard of care.
I talked to a case worker not that long ago who said she had a patient who had been in a full blown state of psychosis for months with no help. I know how frighteningly fucked the medical system (which was never great to begin with) is in this country right now. There is no help or even getting better for most health issues. Mental health was always at the bottom of a broken healthcare totem pole even before Trump 2.0.
It’s just another continuous cycle where conservatives yanked funding and fired everyone or got them to quit from rather than keep banging their heads against a wall trying to help people with resources that no longer exist.
Now people are just shuffled from place to place with no chance of actually getting anything resembling help until they’re sent to the ER for an actual life and death emergency. If they survive, they’re just released back on to the streets. It’s a very expensive and worthless cycle, and the people that caused it love to claim it’s evidence that Medicaid is unsustainable. Soon they’ll probably be claiming it’s also evidence it would just be cheaper and better for everyone if they could just lock people up and throw away the key.
That’s what’s so absolutely fucked about all this. It’s not that they want people off the street because they want to help them. They’re making it easier to just lock people away for life, while simultaneously making more cuts for mental health, substance abuse, and housing assistance than ever before.
It’s their same approach to solving crime. It’s not a solution to just lock all poor people up so that there aren’t any more people desperate enough to commit crime. It doesn’t solve any of the complex social issues that are driving crime, addiction, or mental health problems, and often the people making these policies have an added incentive due to their own investments in the entire fucked up system they’ve created.
The more you jam pack private prisons/detention centers/institutions, the more their stock goes up. And it’s so fucking sneaky and evil how many fucking different ways they’ve figured out how to capitalize on the problem and prey on people who need help instead of actually just trying to help them.
It’s not even just private prisons anymore. Now it’s also the fucking transportation companies to and from the prisons. It’s the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture the expensive patented medications that doctors are pressured to prescribe to patients when they’re institutionalized.
I literally wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are oligarchs hedging their bets on Trump’s executive order to make it easier to lock people up for mental illness. They’re probably buying up stock in hospital beds and whatever company makes straps to keep people restrained.
They think that there’s nothing wrong with this. That they’re just being smart/good at business by backing the policy that’s destroying lives, and that they’re actually “helping people” by taking them somewhere else where society doesn’t have to see them or think about them. Out of sight. Out of mind.
I think that the day we start locking up these callous, wealth hoarding, manipulative, narcissistic, predatory psychopaths away from the rest of society and forcing them to get treatment, maybe we can start talking about locking up everyone else against their will for obvious mental health problems they refuse to address.
That’s what it really is. The same old saying that a poor person with mental illness is a burden to society while a rich person with mental illness can be an eccentric. Except the eccentrics have been allowed to take over the government, and they’ve started capitalizing on their ability to do harm to others. The “eccentrics” who claim that their callous and unemotional behavior is what makes them so great at the game of life, even as they continue to pose the most obvious threat to society compared to the “crazy people” they want to lock away.
All true, and incentive to fix what’s wrong with the system, but we can’t fix it in it’s current state, it needs billions in investment to reverse the damage caused by Reagan that turned people loose in the streets in the first place.
Locally, in my town? I think a billion would cover it.
We need a no questions asked hospital for medical care and a no questions asked mental health/addiction clinic. Get everyone the treatment they need. If they need permanent care, provide permanent care.
If folks are physically and mentally fit (or when they become physically and mentally fit), they need an agency for job training and placement and housing assistance. Provide email, address and phone service, as well as laundry assistance. Job and interview training.
There also need to be specialists on the job and housing sides too who deal with people with criminal records.
Speaking of, people with open warrants or actively committing crimes need to go through the criminal justice system.