In NZ I do know the cops like to kick you when you're down. Let's say you've climbed a scaffold that's around a building and you want to jump but you are saved (as you had been on the phone with a suicide help line, and they passed the details to the Police), you get done with a trespass charge and can be convicted. I really hate reading stories like this - way to kick someone while they're at rock bottom, potentially making them actually do it so they don't have to go to court, get publicly shamed and potentially getting a criminal record.
Many cultures have a long, ingrained history of making suicidal people's lives intentionally worse as a misguided attempt to discourage suicides. A book that discusses this phenomenon that I found helpful was Al Alvarez' book "The Savage God"; Alvarez was a friend of Sylvia Path, who felt compelled to explore the issue in terms of the narratives we tell ourselves and each other about it.
In Western Christian countries, there are recorded cases of people who attempted suicide unsuccessfully being brought before the court, convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging. Reality here seems more like an extremely dark monty python sketch.
Some Western cultures also buried victims of suicide at public crossroads, a little like the bodies of murderers would be intentionally made spectacles. One view of this an explicit attempt to make it harder for their spirits to find their eternal resting places.
I cannot recall if it was in Alvarez' book where I learned it, but in my research I gathered that among some Iwi (Maori tribes) there was a culture of burying members who had killed themselves just outside the walls of their Marae (Meeting-house grounds), where their resting places would be trampled over as a sign of disrespect and societal rejection.
Even today, we see something of this view in institutions like universities etc, whose response to suicidal issues is often one that makes that persons life harder, eg communicating to a suicidal student that any further attempt on their life will result in them being expelled from their study program. I feel like for people on the receiving end, the 'message' being communicated here is one of rejection, and the threat of humiliation following any subsequent unsuccessful attempt.
I remember watching the movie “I Care A Lot” starring Rosamund Pike and Peter Dinklage. (*SPOILERS*)
In that movie as well, Rosamund’s character got old people institutionalised by making bogus reports from a doctor and sold off their property. I didn’t really like the movie but I thought it was kind of unrealistic that the government could really do such a thing (as her character explains the state can step in and essentially put a person in rehab/old age care center if they are given evidence that the person is “unstable”. Rosamund’s character played the system by manipulating the courts). I thought that part was unrealistic but I guess I was wrong.
Scary isn't it. People used to think sexual desire in women was a 'mental illness'. I wonder what we're committing people for today that will embarrass us in the future.
Incarceration over cannabis is already seen as embarrassing. Mental health care overall, but especially drug addiction will be looked at as positively medieval. The barriers to treatment for ADHD. The disastrous state of treatment for people, but especially women with autism. Hell, the way women are treated by some mental health professionals, it might as well still be the dark ages where hysteria was considered a valid diagnosis.
> The barriers to treatment for ADHD. The disastrous state of treatment for people, but especially women with autism.
I'm going to put "treatment" in huge quotes. Do these people need treatment or do they need society to stop bothering them and accept them the way they are?
I've walked away from tasks for a second and completely forgotten about them. I don't absorb training and can't hold a job. I've made it through about two books in my adult life. All of my programming projects end somewhere between the initial idea and the first problem I have real trouble with.
What does any of that have to do with society bothering or accepting me?
I have ADHD. I can achieve more of what I want to achieve when I am on my medication. I prefer not to take it on Saturdays, as a day of rest kind of thing, but otherwise I think the treatment is quite beneficial, and think "treatment" is entirely the correct word.
The idea that there isn't such a thing as a condition causing malfunctions in mental processes, and that all such things are just differences in preferences and such that merely need to be "accepted", doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If someone gets brain damage which damages say Wernicke's area, and causing Wernicke's aphasia. It would be quite silly to say that this isn't a problem or damage which could make sense to treat.
I see no reason that this should change when the differences are more subtle and such.
Now, that being said, I do think it makes sense to basically always defer to the person's own evaluation of whether they need treatment. If someone claims they don't need or want treatment, forcing them to receive "treatment" is, uh, in almost all possible situations, very bad? (note : this doesn't mean "in almost all situations in which this actually ends up happening.". I don't know about those cases. But the danger of like, classifying political opponents as being mentally ill and as needing treatment, is such a terrible danger, that norms should forbid anything within a very large conceptual distance from it.)
Various laws, such as the Baker Act in Florida, it’s so bad it’s used like this in sentences: “Yeah, Sally was baker act’ed last week, she’s still in”.
In NZ I do know the cops like to kick you when you're down. Let's say you've climbed a scaffold that's around a building and you want to jump but you are saved (as you had been on the phone with a suicide help line, and they passed the details to the Police), you get done with a trespass charge and can be convicted. I really hate reading stories like this - way to kick someone while they're at rock bottom, potentially making them actually do it so they don't have to go to court, get publicly shamed and potentially getting a criminal record.