I've been trying to write about this for days, but Blogger has been behaving oddly and so I have lost this post twice now.
Mental Illness maybe a fiction to some philosophical persuasions; they only have neurological disorders and so, psychotherapy is a load of dross according to that school of thought attributed to one Mr. Szasz. Well, philosophically, there might be an argument to say medicalising the problem is somehow *wrong*, but what we're finding is that the alternative to the medicalising the problem is criminalising the problem, and that isn't working out to the benefit of the most people. i.e. it's not good governance or government.
This is manifest in the fact that 50% of the male prison inmates and 70% of female prison inmates have serious mental illnesses in New South Wales. That was the number quoted at me a few days ago by PJ and Big W. The police minister of NSW is saying that inadvertently he finds himself in charge of the largest asylum in the state. That's a staggering number of crazy people who are getting criminalised, and ending up in an even more dehumanising form of confinement. If releasing patients of asylums in to the wider society in order to 'de-institutionalise' them, maybe that plan hasn't worked as well as people have hoped.
Just passing on the thought.
Bottom line, we're not looking after the mentally ill in our society all that well.
3 comments:
Very interesting post...
Apparently the current policy of de-institutionalisation was introduced in the 70s, so it's not a new problem. The problem persists because there are no votes to be gained in fixing it, which is a sad indictment of Australian values (and of our political system).
True enough.
I'm not baggiing de-institutionalisation per se.
De-institutionalisation requires a certain amount of back-up. Like people like Big W doing their jobs. he reports that in the last few years, it's been less and less likely to secure beds for the crazy people he has to talk down from the edge of criminality.
He says that these days, chances are, there will be no beds whatsoever.
So, no back up for Big W as he does his job out there.
Nobody gets to find out about these situations unless they have immediate family members who are mentally disturbed and can't get the requisite help. But Big W and his co-workers can't take this story to the public because they are contractually gagged by the government. So there's no public review of the situation, while the government reviews are all un-realistic, and that's another big problem.
It also explains how the penitentiaries end up filled with folks with SMI. And that's got to be worse than the institutions that existed before.
Anyway, I made the entry because somebody ought to say *something* about it, even if they're not an expert.
If people knew, then there might actually be votes in the balance.
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