I believe society also has an obligation to step in, but with an open hand and possibly some incentives, not with a display of force. And yes, involuntarily institutionalizing someone is a display of force.
And my questions remain: define insanity as it is something you are willing to deny self determination to someone over and decide where the limits are in each direction. And the fact that you didn’t acknowledge the study I linked to the Wikipedia page for says a lot. The Rosenhan Experiment is a large part of why we drastically cut down on forced institutionalizations in the US, because psychiatrists were not getting the consistency in diagnosis to justify what they were doing.
Insanity isn’t a single thing, its a values based severity and pattern judgement of mental behavior that people make. A person with delusions is one of the archetypal “insane” people and yet some of them can hold a job and seem fine until the topic of aliens comes up. A person with executive function disorders may struggle to hold down a job while being fully aware and desiring to do so, but the idea of a padded cell may be so horrifying to them that they’d rather risk dying outside to it (and yet these disorders are quite common in significantly milder forms). Hallucinations are extremely stigmatized, but also in their mildest form they’re just normal (hearing your name in random noises for example). A person who chooses to live in a van traveling and performing for little money even when they have far more successful opportunities may be called insane by some, and I’m strongly suspicious that the ratio is dependent on their performance skills.
That’s before it gets political. To a person in China, Patrick Henry might be declared insane for asserting that if he cannot be given liberty then he should be given death. There are sitting congresspeople who want to institutionalize critics of the president and trans people. If you grant the power to institutionalize people without strict limits and controls you create a weapon of repression.
A person who speaks out against the party in a totalitarian regime may lose their job and home, and in such a case insanity and integrity may become identical. Hell someone in the 1970s insisting that the government is attempting to mind control people by dosing them with LSD and is infiltrating left wing organizations to disrupt them. At the time that was insane conspiracy theorism, today that’s American history thanks to the reveal of MK ULTRA and COINTELPRO. A hundred and fifty years ago you could be institutionalized for shit that horrifies people today.
The fact is, I’m comfortable with risking that some people die if it means everyone has more freedom from excesses in government force. I already accepted it with criminal justice as a part of my opposition to the absurd sentences America has and our fear of recidivism. I don’t want that person you talked about to suffer, I’d much rather that she get help. But when you give the government or medical institutions the power to lock up those they deem irrational and incapable of making their own choices you give them the power to strip freedoms from those they choose.
There’s a lot of writing on this, much of it is from those with a history of mental illness. I highly recommend reading some to better argue against it.
The inherent problem with the Rosenham Experiment is that it involved sane people actively attempting to deceive doctors. That has no bearing on a sane person being incorrectly diagnosed assuming they do not attempt to appear to be insane.
In fact, that entire experiment is more or less discounted as fraud these days:
Mental health professionals, in fact, take the ‘mental’ part out, health professionals in general assume that people presenting a medical condition are honest brokers*, they can’t be faulted for failing to detect unreliable narrators.
* With the notable exception of women and minorities. Doctors seem all too willing to discount self reporting by women and minorities, that’s an entirely separate issue.
But to get back to your larger point of how do you define mental illness severe enough to when society needs to step in and take over:
It should be super simple. When your mental illness reaches a point where it’s having a systemic impact on others.
The lady sleeping on the freeway is actively posing a danger to other people. If some motorist hits her, she’s not the only person who is going to be critically injured. She needs to be removed and treated.
Or, take animal hoarders for example, they are actively posing a danger to the innocent animals they have collected.
It’s the whole “your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.” Someone quietly going insane, not bothering anyone and refusing treatment is far different than, say, someone wandering into traffic waving a sword around.
When your problem becomes someone elses problem, it becomes all of ours problem. That’s when someone steps in. I’d much rather have it be a psych ward than the cops.
I believe society also has an obligation to step in, but with an open hand and possibly some incentives, not with a display of force. And yes, involuntarily institutionalizing someone is a display of force.
And my questions remain: define insanity as it is something you are willing to deny self determination to someone over and decide where the limits are in each direction. And the fact that you didn’t acknowledge the study I linked to the Wikipedia page for says a lot. The Rosenhan Experiment is a large part of why we drastically cut down on forced institutionalizations in the US, because psychiatrists were not getting the consistency in diagnosis to justify what they were doing.
Insanity isn’t a single thing, its a values based severity and pattern judgement of mental behavior that people make. A person with delusions is one of the archetypal “insane” people and yet some of them can hold a job and seem fine until the topic of aliens comes up. A person with executive function disorders may struggle to hold down a job while being fully aware and desiring to do so, but the idea of a padded cell may be so horrifying to them that they’d rather risk dying outside to it (and yet these disorders are quite common in significantly milder forms). Hallucinations are extremely stigmatized, but also in their mildest form they’re just normal (hearing your name in random noises for example). A person who chooses to live in a van traveling and performing for little money even when they have far more successful opportunities may be called insane by some, and I’m strongly suspicious that the ratio is dependent on their performance skills.
That’s before it gets political. To a person in China, Patrick Henry might be declared insane for asserting that if he cannot be given liberty then he should be given death. There are sitting congresspeople who want to institutionalize critics of the president and trans people. If you grant the power to institutionalize people without strict limits and controls you create a weapon of repression.
A person who speaks out against the party in a totalitarian regime may lose their job and home, and in such a case insanity and integrity may become identical. Hell someone in the 1970s insisting that the government is attempting to mind control people by dosing them with LSD and is infiltrating left wing organizations to disrupt them. At the time that was insane conspiracy theorism, today that’s American history thanks to the reveal of MK ULTRA and COINTELPRO. A hundred and fifty years ago you could be institutionalized for shit that horrifies people today.
The fact is, I’m comfortable with risking that some people die if it means everyone has more freedom from excesses in government force. I already accepted it with criminal justice as a part of my opposition to the absurd sentences America has and our fear of recidivism. I don’t want that person you talked about to suffer, I’d much rather that she get help. But when you give the government or medical institutions the power to lock up those they deem irrational and incapable of making their own choices you give them the power to strip freedoms from those they choose.
There’s a lot of writing on this, much of it is from those with a history of mental illness. I highly recommend reading some to better argue against it.
The inherent problem with the Rosenham Experiment is that it involved sane people actively attempting to deceive doctors. That has no bearing on a sane person being incorrectly diagnosed assuming they do not attempt to appear to be insane.
In fact, that entire experiment is more or less discounted as fraud these days:
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/distillations-pod/the-fraud-that-transformed-psychiatry/
Mental health professionals, in fact, take the ‘mental’ part out, health professionals in general assume that people presenting a medical condition are honest brokers*, they can’t be faulted for failing to detect unreliable narrators.
* With the notable exception of women and minorities. Doctors seem all too willing to discount self reporting by women and minorities, that’s an entirely separate issue.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/pain/the-dangerous-dismissal-of-womens-pain
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/2021/06/physicians-more-likely-to-doubt-black-patients
But to get back to your larger point of how do you define mental illness severe enough to when society needs to step in and take over:
It should be super simple. When your mental illness reaches a point where it’s having a systemic impact on others.
The lady sleeping on the freeway is actively posing a danger to other people. If some motorist hits her, she’s not the only person who is going to be critically injured. She needs to be removed and treated.
Or, take animal hoarders for example, they are actively posing a danger to the innocent animals they have collected.
It’s the whole “your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.” Someone quietly going insane, not bothering anyone and refusing treatment is far different than, say, someone wandering into traffic waving a sword around.
Man, I WISH I was kidding about that last one.
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2015/05/sword-wielding_bipolar_man_in.html
When your problem becomes someone elses problem, it becomes all of ours problem. That’s when someone steps in. I’d much rather have it be a psych ward than the cops.