Bring back mental health institutions to house and care for people who have mental health issue that present a threat of harm or danger to themselves and the public. Individuals who commit a crime, evaluate for mental health issues contributing to their actions will be remanded as wards of the state, and custody placed into a facility to be cared for medically, as well as keep them safe from themselves and protect the general welfare.
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Totally agree. As a medical professional, I’ve seen soooo many psych patients not assimilating into society that need to be in full time residential mental health institutions. We need to reopen mental health hospitals that do long-term treatment, because some people will never get better and need people who are taking care of them 24/7. The current model is to use Social Security disability to pay for their group homes, which are ran by private people who collect a check and take very poor care of these mental health patients. When the asylums got shut down because of all the terrible things that they used to do warranted it, there was no plan on what to replace that with.
And now we have so many people suffering from severe mental illness, living on the street homeless, strung out on drugs, stuck between group homes and constant readmission to the hospital. They are way too many people they cannot function on their own and society that are unsafe in the current model that we have now.
The problem is that people only get intensive psychiatric treatment When admitted to a hospital. But medical hospitals are not equipped to do long-term care so people who cannot get better within a week or two become a severe burden on the medical hospital. And then a rush to try to discharge them begins whether or not they are actually safe to go home and function and society. There is a severe drain of resources on medical hospitals, trying to take care of all of the psychiatric needs our communities because we do not have residential psych hospitals, like back in the day. People need a place to go when it takes years to get better. And currently we have nothing that provides that.
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I agree with you Zachary,
Don’t you (the reader) wish that the rest of society (especially gun owners) would no longer be blamed for certain problems and instead, the people with the mental health issues who cause the problems and/or commit the crimes would be blamed? Yeah, me too.
I think to the half of the country that voted on policy rather than feelings it is really obvious that there is a mental health problem in this country. Some of the key history on this subject as I understand it, is that the Reagan administration listened to the pharmaceutical industry’s claims that they had the ‘magic pill’ for mental health and that the federal government no longer needed to fund the mental health institutions found all over the country decades ago (anyone Gen-X and older remembers those). The Reagan administration went along with the pharmaceutical industry and pulled funding to the mental health institutions, including the mental hospitals (a.k.a luny bins).
Take a look at what this has borne. We have crazy people and drug-addicted people (lots of overlap there) homeless on the streets. We have a very large portion of the population that believe that men can be women, and, even worse, that they should be allowed on women’s sports teams and in women’s restrooms. We have people climbing on top of rooftops and camping in bushes at golf courses to try and assassinate a presidential candidate because they listened to voices that told them that particular candidate is/was Adolf Hitler reincarnated…the list goes on and on.
What follows is a general outline of what I think would work insofar as an approach to this issue:
We could make policy that allows for an individual who is having mental health issues and who is either diagnosed and encouraged to seek treatment, or on their own volition, to go to a mental hospital (either directly or indirectly through referral, say via mental health professional) and commit themselves. It could be for a day, a few days, a week, months…I put the timescale at up to 2 years. Their job will be waiting for them for up to 2 years. Their employer will be reimbursed a certain percentage of their wage (I arbitrarily would set that at 75%) to hire another worker in their stead while they are being treated. If it is deemed after 1 month of treatment that the individual will be staying at least 2 more months in the treatment facility, then the federal government (yes I know this will be costly…but look at the cost of NOT doing anything…hear me out) will pay workers (a contractor company…not federal workers) to move their household into a storage unit, to include at least 1 individual from the appropriate Inspector General’s office to physically oversee the moving of the household into the storage unit. The storage unit will be paid for up to 2 years in total (maybe a little more to allow them to restart their job and get some income flowing again). This cost would be paid by individuals who make more than a set amount, or are worth more than a certain amount (total assets and currency), as determined by Congress (and using the federal cost-of-living adjustment tables…whatever they’re actually called) perhaps that amount could coincide with tax brackets, or medicare benchmarks.
If the individual does not show enough improvement to be deemed a non-threat to society by 2 years, they will be forcibly committed for longer, and the above will no longer be paid for, and their employer may find somebody else to permanently employ another person in that job position.
If however, the person was deemed to have mental health conducive to release, then their 2A amendments will remain intact, though, perhaps with some stipulations of the mental health professionals that were/are treating them. It may be the case that the individual is deemed as mentally stable and functional enough so long as they continue to see a mental health professional once a week. It could be that the mental health professionals prescribed certain medication, and so long as the individual continues to take that medication they are mentally stable, and as such, they should be allowed to buy, possess, carry on their person, firearms. It could be stipulated in such cases that if the individual stops taking the medication (so long as the mental health professional deem it necessary) that they must transfer their firearms, turn them in, or sell them (and provide proof of such). It could also be that the mental health professionals gave you a ‘clean bill’ and that there are no stipulations or conditions on firearm possession. YES…I know…the part of this regarding the second amendment is a legal nightmare in some states. This is all the more reason to have some level of uniformity regarding the second amendment, from the federal level. Think along the lines of 50-state reciprocity, but that philosophy would extend into areas like this for example. This part of my proposal/idea would require much greater uniformity in this area of the second amendment in order to work (the increase in uniformity would be a good thing I would argue). The federal firearms background check form 4473 (and the state one too) would have to be amended to account for this. If you claim that the mental health professionals said you can possess a firearm so long as you take your medication, you better be able to prove that with documentation, otherwise you can be prosecuted.
For individuals who have cooked themselves on drugs, or are just completely nuts and unfunctional otherwise, "please come this way, we have a nice room for you with clean sheets. You can play chess and card games by the Koi fish/aquarium inside the sanitarium. You won’t have any more need to worry. These people will not receive a lobotomy, will not be experimented on physically (passive studies to include simple observation and passive data gathering should be allowed) and will not be drugged to the point that they are comatose or lethargic. I know it’s a tall order…but we have to find a way. It’s the right thing to do for our society. More than that, I am sick and tired of certain people telling me that I have to give up my rights because others have gone crazy (these two groups of people have a TON of overlap the way I see it…if you’re following me).
Perhaps the majority of those reading this will disagree with the part about firearms and decide instead to keep the policy we have now, which is basically that you lose your right to carry if you’ve ever been committed, that is fine if that is what the majority decides. At least consider the rest of the idea for mental health treatment. We have to do something else, what we do now hasn’t been working.
EDIT: I forgot to mention some things. If you rent the place where you live, I think your rent should be paid until your things are put into storage. If you have a mortgage, your payments to the bank will be suspended and interest will still accrue, but at a low rate (i.e. 1% annualized and fixed rate) up to the 2 year period (plus a little extra I would recommend…again to allow for income to start coming in again). The town or county you live in or a contractor will be paid to mow the lawn twice a month, check up on the house to make sure it hasn’t incurred any damage or been burglarized. If you live in an area where you pay separately for fire services if you want the local fire department to put out the fire if your house catches fire and you haven’t ever paid for it in the past, then you will not get fire service at this point. A contractor service (plumber/electrician/HVAC) will be paid to put your house/utilies into a state that is best for long term such that your house doesn’t burn down due to some electrical problem, your water pipes don’t burst because they froze, etc. At this point, if you must stay in the mental health treatment facility for longer, your bank may sell your house (all current laws will apply and no permanent hit to your credit rating will be incurred.)
YES…this is expensive, but so is our current approach, which is do nothing and let mental illness take it’s toll on society. I firmly believe that after 2-3 decades, we will notice a marked decline in mental illness being passed on generationally, which means that over time the cost of this policy will decline. Likewise, what will be the increase in GDP because of this policy? That might be more difficult to quantize, but I would argue that it would be very significant.