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I get it, mental institutions are responsible for some of the most egregious human rights violations of the 20th century.
But that's an argument to REFORM those institutions, not ELIMINATE them.
We should learn from the lessons of the past and, at the same time, make sure people get the mental health care they need.
If they can be successfully treated and released? Fantastic. If they need to be held for the rest of their lives? It's better than allowing them to roam the streets posing a danger to themselves and others.
We see it in Portland ALL THE TIME.
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I like where your head is at but I doubt Donald thinks that way. He's not really a reform person.
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I've worked in both Community Living Housing and one of the Last Institutions in Canada (Which I recently learned has closed as well). And I got FAR more training and resources to do my job at the Institution, and the residents had far more supports and programming. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, we need to reopen institutions, and just have better systems in place to prevent abuse
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Community Living is the institution. It certainly has its problems though.
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I guess my point is that governments dont have infinite amounts of money. With traditional institutions all of the money that gets budgeted all goes towards one complex where it can be used to its fullest, which allows for better funding for staff training and better community programming for the residents, as well as specialty staff (MDC had dedicated dr's for the residents, providing them faster access to a doctor than the rest of us would get). Funding issues aside, community living is great for medium to high functioning individuals, but can be AWFUL for lower functioning ones. In an institution, a high needs low functioning individual can get more socializing in because they can have 1 staff dedicated to them while the others can just generally overlook the other residents. With community living, as the staff is spread out, this can lead to high needs individuals to be locked up in a household on their own, as there isnt the staffing to be able to let them share a place with others or to visit the community (where they would be a danger to themselves and the community). And lastly, since the staff is spread out, there are FAR more instances where theres only a single staff in the household, which personally I think actuallY INCREASES the chance of abuse
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I'm sure you know more than me, which should be easy since I don't know much. My mom was a community liver all my life. Bureaucracy is a fucker for sure, but I wonder if this is also a grass is greener thing? Maybe your institution was good because it was the only one? Community Living is fucked because it follows the path of all Canadian agencies? My mom certainly had nothing good to say about the nuns who ran the show in her youth.
She didn't have many good things to say about upper management in CL either though.
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I think community living is amazing for medium and high functioning individuals, if you can be guided into being safe for yourself and around others reasonably easily by a staff member? Community Living gives you a more "Normal" life. Low functioning individuals however that pose a danger to themselves and others end up far more isolated with community living than they'd be in an institution. MDC, the institution I worked at had just as horrific a history as most of the other institutions did, I think though, after working there, that was more due to the times than it was due to it being an institution, as, like I said, as of 10 years ago, there was two weeks of training before staff was even allowed to start working on any of the wings, meanwhile with community living I was kind of just thrown into the fire and had to figure things out as I went. Positives with community living mentioned though, I DO have to once again point out we live in a capitalist society, and Community Living requires more funding spread out, which is harder to pry from the government, than an institution gets, which means it inevitably ends up getting less funding for its residents.
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He's looking for a future home, me thinks.
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Okay. I agree.
Now tell me with a straight face you think Orange Face is looking to help these people instead of just removing them from view.
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Oh, definitely not, but that's not a reason to not try. :) It's a reason to invest and make it actually work.
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Oh for sure. I'm just not going to be surprised when these and the safe camp sites for the homeless turn into concentration camps.
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Counterpoint: Mentally ill people have the same rights as everyone else and therefore can't be locked up without a criminal conviction, no matter how annoying their symptoms may be.
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Then we need a national version of the Baker act to commit them for their own welfare. Just because they haven't harmed anyone else (yet) doesn't mean allowing them to roam loose isn't actively harming them themselves.
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How about before we look into finding ways of permanently locking away mentally ill or neurodivergent people, who are already relegated as second class citizens, we find ways of shifting our civic budgetary concerns away from bloated PD coffers and into mental health and advocacy programs instead?
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Why not both?
Here in Portland we're fed up with the mentally ill self medicating on meth and fentanyl, waving axes and machetes at people.
I wish I was exaggerating.
They shouldn't have to victimize the general public before we do something.
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Yeah, no thanks. The moment you lock away groups of people "for their own good" is the moment the majority of the voting public dehumanizes them and only ever perpetuates an 'out of sight, out of mind' mentality in regards to policy.
There is a real storm coming across all of the world in regards to our collective mental health crisis and we're doing a very good job of ignoring it or thinking that reactionary policy that historically has shown to be terrible on most accounts is the best way to confront it.
This is going to play out much the same way as our climate crisis unless we start truly examining, at a policy level, why our contemporary institutions are failing us collectively.
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Again, that's a reason to reform the process and make it work.
The alternative?
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