[grumpymouse]

I have schizophrenia and have been involuntarily hospitalized in the past. For the love of god, if I end up homeless and unable to care for myself do not leave me there out of some notion of how freeing it must be to lie in the gutter with your teeth rotting out of your face! Hospitals suck but being ill is worse, being homeless is worse, being too ill to get off the streets is worse.

[kkdjjj83k]

Amen to this. My mother had schizophrenia as I was growing up and she was hospitalized multiple times during my youth. Sometimes time away allowed for healing and a "normal" life for a while. I'm not sure she could have pulled herself out of these situations without supervision.

Fast forward 30 years, and all the state hospitals are closed. Mentally sick people are left to live on the streets. Meanwhile our culture gets sicker and sicker. Thank you for invoking God.

[saltcured]

Fast forward individual lives, and see how many elderly are now running into a similar Catch 22 with the increasing rates of dementia. Our cultural fixation with individualism and agency leaves a lot of folks in a gray area where they lose their ability to manage their own lives but are not yet clear cases for the state to protect.

During this limbo, people are at great risk for exploitation as well as avoidable catastrophes due to simply being invisible during their decline. Rather than willful neglect, there is simply nobody there with assigned duty to steer folks on the least unhappy path.

Ironically, people with mental illnesses appear to be much more likely to develop dementia too. So they can experience multiple flavors of this tragedy.

[_8j50]

Yeah. On the flip side though, I am firmly against doctors and medical professionals deciding if you should be detained against your will even if you are not sane. I think the balance would be for sane people to opt out of such "treatment" so when the state/institutions attempt to imprison you, you have a way out because while certified as sane you notified them of your will.

Sane or not a person is a person and not a property. Others shouldn't decide your fate without your consent unless your fate affects others. Cruelty disguised as charity is not right. But by default opt-in seems reasonable. If even euthanasia is popular, I hope my comment isn't too extreme or controversial.

[notch656a]

If someone asks and you say no, what do you want them to do? IMO if someone would rather be in a gutter with their teeth rotting out than in an institution, that's their prerogative if they can do it without aggressing upon others.

[Fatnino]

When I was in school there was this homeless guy that moved into a small storage room on the ground floor of the dorm, around the back somewhere. He's had the whole thing going on, matted hair and beard, dirty clothes, shoes falling apart, rot on his shins, piles and piles of crap in "his" storage room and he slept in the middle of it.

He was allowed to go on like this for years because his brother was very wealthy and was generous with the school administrators.

My last year there, the dorm was slated to be torn down and replaced with a much larger one. His brother had to come and take him away.

A few months later I saw him sitting on a bench and he looked like a completely different person. Clean shaven, put together. He told me the time he spent living in the storage closet was horrible and he wished his brother had forced him into treatment years earlier.

[notch656a]

The moral of the story is people should be forced to do things without their consent if they'll be healthier/better for it?

I find myself utterly incompatible in living in such a society and I've spent much of my life seeking other people and locations that eschew such violence

[Fatnino]

No, the moral of the story is that just like you wouldn't allow a 4 year old to choose his own bed time or to eat candy for dinner, you also shouldn't let someone with compromised mental faculties make decisions about living in storage rooms.

[notch656a]

The legal position of starting off as a free person and having that taken away is not at all analogous to one of someone who starts out as an unfree person (child) and has (or hasn't) reached self agency. Pretty disingenuous analogy, and even then we're ignoring the contextual differences typical present between mother/father/guardian and a government apparatus. This is seen time and time again, for example the burden for a parent to not have their kid removed is not at all the same as the burden to get your kid back from state custody. That is the decision making path (grant agency to non-free person vs don't remove agency to free person) is not symmetrical in either direction as you mistakenly suggest towards.

Also If we're going by someone with compromised mental faculties, I would say an organization (state of New York) who physically and/or sexually abuses the disabled* is not fit to make these decisions. The New York State government has proven themselves to have compromised mental faculties and thus unable to make these decisions to violently/forcibly institutionalize the portion of 'mentally ill' adults who don't aggress upon others. In part New York paired down their institutions because they were such terrible places for these people to be, often worse than in the gutter with teeth rotting.

IMO even the disabled, especially if they are not acting in a criminal capacity, should be asked for their consent before violently being forced into institutions of physical and sexual abuse for which New York is known.

*grep for my below comment about Willowbrook State School where we discover the (mentally disabled) children you worry so much about are actually abused by New York when institutionalized.

[sershe]

Why does the order matter in "has (or hasn't) reached self agency"? Brain is an organ - you seem to agree that child's brain is under-developed and may lack sufficient "self agency". Adult's can be destroyed in various degrees from 0 to irreversible coma. At some point you have to draw a line and say - "this brain is too underdeveloped/damaged, it doesn't have sufficient self agency".

You don't draw child's line at merely being to express their desires, why would you do so for an adult?

[rmah]

The problem is that this hypothetical person is severely mentally ill. And thus not rational. This means their answer to the question cannot be taken at face value. You write, "if someone would rather"... as if they will hold the same opinion after the same after treatment as before. If asked again after a course of treatment, they may opt to be released. Or they may be incredibly thankful for the intervention.

IMO, what you're saying is analogous to "if someone suffering from clinical depression wants to kill themselves, let them." I vote no. Please think about it a bit.

[notch656a]

I don't think their should be a court of rationality. You should have the right to be irrational, including the right to commit suicide because sad face or a lizard looked at you wrong, if you can do it without aggressing upon others. Your body, your choice.

[rmah]

Well, that's an opinion, I guess.

[blueprint]

how many times are you going to say "aggressing"? is that even a real word?

[carewell]

I don't know if it's some extreme libertarianism or just pure lack of compassion. Some people need - and deserve - help. "Your body, your choice" is just an all-around horrible argument to use for justifying suicide due to mentally or emotionally compromised state.

[notch656a]

It's not the offering of help I take issue with. It's the use of force/violence to impose it, most especially in cases where there is no criminal wrongdoing.

Personally I find your stance far more judgmental than mine; no one needs to 'justify' to someone else why they will or will not commit suicide. It's not even for me to justify or not when someone else does that and I reject your allegation I've done so.

[carewell]

Have you ever faced a person cutting their veins in a psychotic episode? I have. Saying that it's OK to let them bleed out because they refuse help is an asinine, inhumane position. It seems you are speaking from a very disconnected theoretical standpoint, ignoring the vastness of extreme human conditions.

[nscalf]

Society has a responsibility to step in and provide help to those who are so mentally ill they're going to end up homeless. Both for the individual, and society. If you're so mentally ill that you're choosing to end up in a gutter with your teeth rotting out, you are not mentally fit to make that decision.

[blooalien]

The problem I've personally seen is that we live in a society that will happily force situations on others "for their own good", but will actively fight against helping those of us who are literally losing their minds due to their teeth rotting out of their heads who desperately want help but cannot get it because we fall in some shitty "grey zone" where we have enough money to (barely) survive, but not enough to afford the medical care we so desperately need / want. I personally want nothing more in life than to get back to doing the various computer related work I've done and enjoyed most of my life, but at this stage I'm so mentally fucked up that I literally can not and I can't find the basic simple help I've needed desperately for decades now, and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to recover from the long-term damage done by the constant literal agony of my daily waking nightmare (the two to four hours of sleep I get on good nights, etc). Truth is that I'm probably not far off from ending up in a gutter myself at this point, all due to a run of bad luck starting with a broken tooth (and a couple other medical issues that were minor at the time). Fuck this world and the humans that created the society that poisons it for allowing these sorts of things to happen entirely out of greed and ignorance. I truly do look forward to the coming entirely human created apocalypse we're so hell-bent on having. At least I can die knowing we won't be escaping the planet to poison / destroy other amazing planets with our hatred and greed.

[jimmygrapes]

Hi. I'm you, ten years ago.

You have already heard all the unsolicited opinions and suggestions from people who have no fucking clue what you're going through or what 6oige been through. You have been told "just do X, Y, Z" and have been given countless resources both local and national that others think would help you. You tried contacting a few and they were too demanding, demeaning, or discriminating.

You spent a lot of time learning helplessness even as you became self sufficient to the best of your ability. It wasn't enough either way. Nobody wanted to help you, they just wanted to tell you that they want to, and you discovered that you don't even want their help anyway because it comes with caveats and requirements that you simply cannot tolerate or meet.

You found a way to stay connected and survive despite all this. You know you can take care of yourself. You know you are worth someone's effort and time, but you can't find that someone. Every time you think you do, they fuck you over in some way.

The tiny things added up. A broken this, a missed that, a forgotten something by someone. Dominoes fell. There are plenty of individuals at fault but it's mostly the systems, or The System. The World Should Be Better, but it's not. People are assholes, churches and charities are grifters, there's no hope for those who proffer hope. You're right.

You're right. You're on your own. You're better than all of them.

Prove it.

[blooalien]

> "Prove it."

Workin' on it to the best of my ability. 'Tis taking far longer than I'd hoped, and all the while the pain and lack of sleep drives me slowly insane… It's a race against time, and so far time is winning. Ah well… Live alone, die alone, even surrounded by 8 billion others… C'est la vie…

[notch656a]

Enjoy the generous 'help' New York provides when they operate an expanded system of wards:

  Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo" and offered a series of recommendations for improving conditions.

...

   Shortly thereafter, in early 1972, Geraldo Rivera, then an investigative reporter for WABC-TV in New York, conducted a series of investigations at Willowbrook uncovering a host of deplorable conditions, including overcrowding, inadequate sanitary facilities, and physical and sexual abuse of residents by members of the school's staff. 

It's a far off memory now, but it turns out these are the conditions New Yorkers choose when they create these kind of expanded wards, which ultimately resulted in them being shut down. It's no wonder so many might choose their teeth rotting out in a gutter over this help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School

[voakbasda]

This is why the most terrifying phase I will ever hear is “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”