Let me start by saying that I am always VERY skeptical of any proposal by Trump. He isn’t known for thoughtful positions on anything. He usually just parrots whatever is being said by Fox News which is driven by whatever their corporate overlords have decided will be most beneficial to their pocketbooks.
At the same time, I believe that if I am going to chastise others for being too closed minded and intellectually closed minded to ideas then I must be open minded and consider things that are proposed by the right even though I know from past experience that they usually are intellectually dishonest in their approach to “solving” problems.
The Atlantic published a story a few years back based up a paper in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) questioning whether our country should consider the notion of bringing back psychiatric asylums to help in dealing with the mental health crisis in our country.
In a provocative new paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, bioethicists at the University of Pennsylvania outline the crisis of mental-health care in the United States, and propose a solution: Rehabilitate the ill-reputed institution of the psychiatric asylum.
“It’s really not as radical as it sounds,” said Dominic A. Sisti, assistant professor of medical ethics, health policy, and psychiatry. Psychiatrists have been making arguments for expanding long-term inpatient care for some time, he says. In their call to “bring back the asylum,” Sisti and his colleagues speak of the original, 19th-century meaning of the term asylum: a place that is a safe sanctuary, that provides long-term care for the mentally ill. “It is time to build them—again,” they write.
Although psychiatric hospitals still exist, the dearth of long-term care options for the mentally ill in the U.S. is acute, the researchers say. State-run psychiatric facilities house 45,000 patients, less than a tenth of the number of patients they did in 1955. With the doubling of the U.S. population, the researchers write, this is a 95 percent decline.
I suspect what is going on here is that Trump has latched onto this idea not for the correct reason of it possibly helping the mentally disabled, but for thinking of these institutions as places where he could “dump” folks who he wants to make disappear.
The question in my mind is whether we can possibly get something good out of this even though it comes from a place that isn’t so good. Is there a danger in the use of these institutions being abused and actually being worse for folks than providing help for them?
The fear I have is that most of the money provided for this endeavor would be misused and ended up enriching Trump’s business buddies while the public ends up with inadequate facilities that don’t really improve the problem.
What do you think of the idea of the reemergence of psychiatric institutions? Would they just become a dumping ground for our homeless? Do you think the money spent on this is better spent in other ways for providing better mental health wellness for our citizens?