"nimrod poindexter, idiot extraordinaire" <nervous.n...@gmail.com>
wrote:

History's offer to let us learn from our mistakes?

It's been described that way, yes.

xanthian.

Here in America, we elect our mentally ill to public office in order to
get them out of the way.
--scott

How sad for your only-in-your-own-mind
reputation as a clairvoyant, that I've very
much confirmed that the bulk of prisoners
are mentally ill, and in the most direct of
ways, by being one of them. Seven times
so far. It's amazing how often "being
homeless" leads to "being jailed".

xanthian, under mental health care myself
since 1985.

When you see someone with bullet entry
wounds and exit wounds leading through
the chest and out the back, and you find
that this person is in jail for gun use again,
you realize just _how_ mentally ill the
prison population is, and how little control
of their behavior most of them have.

When you see people with whole chunks
of their body gone missing in criminal acts,
and you see them in jail again, you realize
that sound mental health isn't found in
prison populations.

The only ways to keep these mentally ill
people from commiting crimes, is to lock
them away for life, whether in mental
instutions or prisons, or to watch them
kill themselves with their mentally ill
behaviors.

When you find prisoners jailed for drug
crimes, and you find them using drugs
while in jail, you realize just how little self
control remains to the mentally ill denizens
of our prisons.

Nice attempt at misdirection, but the purpose and
intended effect of the aptly named "Community Mental
Health Centers Act" was to move the mentally ill
from big central state centers to smaller local
community centers. The 500,000 count of
"deinstitutionalized" was just counting how much
lighter the state center burden of patients became,
not how much smaller the overall number of mental
patients in long term care became.

And by the way, that effort began in the Eisenhower
administration, so trying to tag Kennedy with the
results is Yet Another Right Wing Lie.

Well. telling lies as you do to try to exculpate the
Big Miscommunicator isn't going to get you far, your
lies are too easily documented to be what they are,

Reagan's attack against the mental health care
system began during his governorship of California,
but it is easy to see how a habitual liar like you
could fall into the error of worshipping public liar
Reagan, Mr. "Out of the Loop" on Iran Contra.

Let's look at the reality of the situation, as seen
by mental health professionals.

       On July 22, 2003, The President's Freedom
       Commission on Mental Health released its
       final report, "Achieving the Promise:
       Transforming Mental Health Care in America"
       [which can be found at
       http://www.mentalhealthcommission.gov/reports/reports.htm].
       If pursued, its recommendations could lead
       to great progress. Unfortunately the
       Commission maintains that additional funding
       will not be necessary--that giving the
       states more flexibility in how they use
       federal funds is enough. I disagree. Social
       progress requires investment, not just
       restructuring.

       Nation Failed to Keep Promises to People
       with Serious Mental Illnesses

       Nevertheless, the report is a powerful
       reminder that-despite significant
       improvements in the care and treatment of
       people with mental illnesses over the past
       half century-our nation has fundamentally
       failed to keep its promises to people with
       serious mental illnesses.

       In the mid-1950's the first President's
       Commission on mental health called for a
       shift from an institution-based public
       mental health system to a community-based
       system. This report led to the Community
       Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 and to
       deinstitutionalization. In essence this
       nation made a promise to people with serious
       mental illnesses that they would no longer
       be treated as the dregs of humanity and
       banished to institutions to live in squalor
       and in danger without access to decent
       psychiatric treatment. Instead, the nation
       promised, they could live freely as full
       citizens of their society.

       Deinstitutionalization did not Fulfill Its
       Promise

       Deinstitutionalization did not fulfill this
       promise. People were abandoned without
       adequate services in the community or were
       transinstitutionalized to adult homes, which
       were often as squalid and dangerous as the
       institutions they left. Most returned to
       their families, who became the unofficial
       core of the nation's mental health system.

       http://www.mhawestchester.org/advocates/opromise81303.asp

       The mental health problem among the homeless
       may go back to deinstitutionalization of the
       late 1960s.  Then-governor Ronald Reagan
       signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in
       1967, which was designed to protect the
       civil rights of the mentally ill by making
       it more difficult for them to be medicated
       or institutionalized against their will.
       The bill also emptied out the state's mental
       hospitals to save taxpayers money, a move
       that lead to an explosion of homelessness.

       When the mental hospitals were emptied, the
       state promised to still care for those
       patients. The intention was to replace
       institutionalized care with outpatient care,
       medication, and therapy. Many of the
       promises never materialized.

       [...]

       Many mentally ill people also end up in
       jail. Since desperate people often do
       desperate things, and since there is no
       place to put them otherwise, many end up
       costing the state millions of dollars in
       legal fees. As many as one in five of the
       2.1 million Americans in prison are
       seriously mentally ill, far outnumbering the
       number of mentally ill who are in mental
       hospitals, according to a recent study by
       Human Rights Watch.

       http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/10.30.03/mental-health-0344.html

       The act [California 11/2004 ballot
       Proposition 63, restoring part of the
       funding for mental health care] represents
       one of the largest initiatives related to
       mental health since the 1967
       Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which was signed
       by Governor Ronald Reagan and led to the
       closure of the state's mental hospitals.

       http://www.psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/56/6/642

       Our country has been in a very selfish state
       since Ronald Reagan was president.

       [...]

       When the Reagan administration closed the
       doors of most mental health hospitals, the
       homelessness began.

       http://www.pbs.org/now/php/quotes.php?quote_date=2007-01-26

       In 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a
       landmark bill -- the Lanterman-Petris-Short
       Act -- that had bipartisan support. LPS
       effectively emptied the state's mental
       hospitals. Public care of adults and
       children with mental illnesses was delegated
       to a system of community-based programs
       created under the Short-Doyle Act in the
       1950s. Reagan proudly announced that he was
       closing several state mental facilities and
       eliminating 1,700 staff jobs.

       [...]

       As an alternative to hospitalization, LPS
       required California's counties to provide
       the services locally that were needed by
       people with mental illness. The state would
       assume 90 percent of the costs and the money
       would "follow the patients," the legislature
       promised. But in 1973, budgetary pressures
       led lawmakers to cap the state outlay. Only
       cost-of-living increases have been applied
       during the intervening three decades -- and
       not even those, most recently.

       [...]

       But for many patients,
       de-institutionalization meant the
       opportunity to huddle in doorways, cardboard
       boxes, cars, or temporary shelters. Homeless
       and without support, they often neglected to
       take their medications. Relapses meant
       section 5150 holds and a renewal of the
       destructive sequence.

       Nor did counties have the resources,
       especially given the state's diminishing
       contributions, to follow through on the
       promises of LPS. Local jails and prisons
       became and remain California's primary de
       facto inpatient mental health facilities.

       San Francisco police alone answer up to
       9,000 section 5150 calls each year -- a
       quarter involving a homeless person. The
       person is lodged in a cell for an average of
       17 hours, at a cost per incident of about
       $1,800 in police time and emergency
       psychiatric care, the San Francisco Police
       Department reports.

       From a state budget standpoint, the hand-off
       of responsibility for mental health services
       has been a good deal. There are now about
       4,400 patients in California's four
       state-run mental hospitals (Atascadero,
       Metropolitan, Napa, and Patton, with a fifth
       under construction in Coalinga), as compared
       to nearly 36,000 the year LPS was
       implemented. Since 1973, only about 2
       percent of the state's general fund has been
       devoted to mental health services in the
       community -- half the commitment of prior
       years -- according to Steinberg.

       Meanwhile, the population in need is
       substantial. One in five people will
       experience some form of mental illness
       during a lifetime, the World Health
       Organization reports; in any given year,
       almost one in ten will be suffering from a
       depressive disorder. There are 36 million
       Californians. Among them are an estimated
       300,000 homeless, of whom one in six, or
       about 50,000, are believed to be mentally
       ill.

       http://www.healthvote.org/index.php/site/article/C26/63_background/

It isn't like this stuff is some big secret, so that
you ever had a chance of getting your lies believed:

That would be the research done when all of the most
dangerously mentally ill were already
institutionalized, I presume? You'll notice above that
about 13% of the population are mentally ill "at all",
but that 20% of prisoners are "_severely_ mentally
ill", a larger than chance proportion of the mentally
ill population, and a fraction focused among the
worst off members of that population. That indicates,
by a simple check of the facts, that your sources
are completely in error. Of course, your right-wing
agenda requires that you believe them anyway.

Speaking as one of America's forty million or so
mentally ill, I can _promise_ you that your findings
don't apply to me, but then, I used to pet hydrogen
bombs affectionately as part of my submarine missile
technician day job, in between investigating with my
fellow technicians just where jumper wires could be
placed to bypass all the launch permission circuits,
so I might, just might, be an outlier in that data set.

FYI

xanthian.

Bypassing stuff like "Captain's Permission to Fire"
is trivial, can be done with a 10" jumper wire in one
of the Fire Control cabinets, and the nice "One Line"
wiring diagrams all technicians use show just how to
do it. Won't _that_ make you sleep easier tonight!