Well, don't ask for whom the bell tolls.
Our belief in mental illness as a functional brain defect or chemical imbalance which should be treated with medicine necessarily demands that we create and tolerate the exact situations the Trib is complaining about with the most ostentatious moral outrage.
Sex offenders and violent criminals are living in nursing homes because they are officially patients. Remember? If they're patients why shouldn't they be in nursing homes? We've all decided mental illness is just like heart disease or cancer, so it's only fair!
The young murderer two doors down the hall from Grandpa strangled his girlfriend with a clothesline a few years ago because of schizophrenia, not because he was a bad guy. Schizophrenia gets treated with antipsychotic meds, especially those "atypical" ones, which are so much better than the old drugs. Remember? Medical science and brain research have made such wonderful progress, and breakthroughs are just right around the corner, if only we pay enough taxes for psychiatrists to "treat" more and more people.
The sex offender housed in the room next to Grandma isn't a despicable pervert, he's sick. Remember? It's all best understood in terms of his brain, which is is an organ just like the heart or the liver. So this guy's behavior is a medical issue, just like Grandma's diabetes. We can't discriminate, it's not nice and maybe it's not even legal.
Self-appointed media watchdogs complain about "compromised care" and trumpet elaborate, "early morning raids" by combined state and federal law enforcement agencies against nursing homes. I'm sorry, but this is a farce.
Do we want to continue our delusional attempt to replace social justice and traditional law with medicine? The economics of our love affair with modern psychiatry are inexorable. Nursing homes will never be safe places again, and we have no right to believe they should be. Let's either knock off the hypocrisy or figure out how to eliminate the insanity defense (and any other psychiatric excuses) from our legal system.
Very well said Randy. I might suggest you read the new statute regarding ex cons, sex offenders, "mentally ill" ex cons,and cuckoos generally who are destined for nursing home custody/care. One of my former slavemasters and torturers, Dan Cuneo, Ph.D., gets 100's of thousands of dollars yearly to
ReplyDelete"screen" these characters. The new law requires segregated rooms and guard protocols for these "sick" "patients".
One will not hear a single word of protest by the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill or any of these marxist c/s/x groups like "Mind Freedom" about the violation of the "rights" of these "ill" brethren. The hypocrisy and mendacity runs deep in every camp but ours. Cops, quacks, legislators, judges, prosecutors "advocates for the mentally ill", etc, all ACT as if they know all too well that "insanity" is a hoax and "mental illness" just another way to designate a scumbag.
I wonder if things will truly shift into the realm of the absurd if/when our brave new world of socialized medicine demands universal care for the "mentally ill".
NAMI should have a poster of am ailing brain handcuffed to the rail of a bed in a nursing home.
ne will not hear