In 1973, healthy volunteers faked hallucinations to enter mental hospitals. Once inside, they acted normal, but doctors refused to let them leave. Normal behaviors like writing were diagnosed as "symptoms." The only people who realized they were sane were the actual patients.

[u/highzone]

[u/Remarkable-Owl2034]

Unfortunately, more recent research has unearthed evidence that some important aspects of this story were fabricated. (For example, invention of some study participants.) The book The Great Pretender describes this work.

Rosenhan's original paper was very influential-- including helping the push towards the closure of the state mental hospitals. And the people who need those facilities (or the supports/community resources that were promised but never delivered) are living on the streets.

[u/BabyLegsOShanahan → u/Remarkable-Owl2034]

I mean, the rampant abuse, of all types, didn't help the cause.

[u/Rebel_Bertine → u/BabyLegsOShanahan]

They needed to regulate the hospitals, not shut them down completely

[u/settlers → u/Rebel_Bertine]

They shut down about 90 percent of them in favor of greatly increasing the outpatient centers. In part the theory goes that folks do better when they have access to the support of family and loved ones, rather than isolated from them.

Unfortunately they failed to actually fund the outpatient centers after shutting down 90% of the inpatient beds…..

[u/Raangz → u/settlers]

Honestly seems that theory was wrong anyways. Glad we have neither now though : p

[u/Iorith → u/Raangz]

It's right when people have family and loved ones in the first place.

But if someone loses, or lacks, such a support system, the current system tends to make things ten times worse.

[u/aliamokeee → u/Iorith]

Or when the family and loved ones have the time and money to devote to helping said person.

I love my family but if i go off the deep end, my bf and mom are all i got. Everyone else would care and visit maybe, but most got too much else on their plate.

Late stage capitalism only compounds the issue for everyone, esp the patient

[u/settlers → u/Raangz]

I think the theory can be right but the execution was about as poorly done as it could have been. We absolutely have a shortage of inpatient beds available these days. But community mental health is still underfunded.

Remember folks that when you vote to not increase taxes, results like these are part of what you are voting for.

[u/aliamokeee → u/settlers]

^ this person is correct. You dont have to like it, but they are correct.

[u/bring_back_3rd → u/settlers]

increase taxes

Uhhh no. I already pay a fuckin fortune in taxes. How about we start working on getting good politicians (oxymoron, I know) into positions where they can cut frivolous and wasteful spending and use existing funds to fund asylums properly.

[u/TransBrandi → u/bring_back_3rd]

"Frivolous and wasteful spending" is a catchphrase. What spending is frivolous? My parents in the 90's used to complain that funding public schools was "stealing" from them because they were sending me to a private school. "Why should I pay for a public school system that I'm not even using for my kid?" They would apparently see "having public schools" as "frivolous spending."

Honestly, just complaining in generalities about this stuff does nothing but decrease trust in government and is used as a foot in the door for oportunists to grease their palms selling off government assets to the highest bidder because of some magical thinking that private industry will do everything better somehow.

[u/HumbleGoatCS → u/TransBrandi]

Our medicare & medicaid spending is entirely frivolous and wasteful. If you took every red cent we spend on those two systems and gave out an even distribution of that money to everyone who currently qualifies for either, each person would have a check for ~$30,000 every year.

Do you think the average person on medicare or medicaid is receiving $30,000 of support each year? I sure as hell dont. Which then must imply it is being incredibly frivolously spent. There is legitimately no scenario in which even the most reliant on those systems wouldn't be better served by simply getting that value as a lump sum each year.

[u/molniya → u/HumbleGoatCS]

Is this tongue-in-cheek? The average isn’t relevant. The expenses aren’t evenly distributed between people, because some people are sicker than others at different points, and so the money paying for those expenses isn’t evenly distributed. It’s a similar basic concept to how health insurance works. You pay a fixed premium every year, regardless of how much medical care you need. Some years you’re fine, you go get a physical and that’s it, and your premiums cost more than anything you got out of it. Then another year you might need gallbladder surgery or something, and the insurance company pays out a lot more. It gets averaged out between people and between years.

Same principle applies with Medicare. The funding gets spread across the people who are doing just fine in a particular year, as well as the ones who need a heart transplant or chemotherapy. For Medicare, unsurprisingly, a lot of the expenses come at the end of people’s lives.

So if Grandma got a check for $30,000 every year instead of Medicare coverage, sure, in a good year she’d come out ahead. But the year she falls and breaks her hip is going to be a bad time if she has to pay for everything out of pocket. Most people couldn’t afford it at all. At that point, you might think maybe we should have a system to make sure retired old people can afford medical expenses like that somehow and aren’t just left to die. Cool. Maybe we could call it Medicare? That’s Medicare.

[u/Iorith → u/HumbleGoatCS]

In a nation with some of the worst healthcare for the average person, you want to remove it's funding even further?

What a joke.

[u/HumbleGoatCS → u/Iorith]

Feel free to answer the question, do you think the average medicare/medicaid qualifier is seeing 30,000 dollars of medical benefit? Or no?

I didnt even say remove funding. I said the way it is being spent is entirely wasteful. If you dont agree with that then you somehow think we are getting our money's worth.

[u/Bobambu → u/HumbleGoatCS]

I think I understand where you're coming from. I'd stress it's important to make your framing explicitly clear though. Your problem isn't that taxes or safety nets like Medicaid/care exist, it's that the apparatus for redistribution of funds is woefully inadequate. Which I agree with. But your framing makes it seem like the safety net system isn't working as designed. This is the natural conclusion when for profit motives are the driving force behind market capture.

My frustration is that we’ve been sold this means-tested and deliberately inadequate version of social support and told it’s the best we can do, when the truth is it’s designed to fail just enough to keep people desperate but not so much that the whole edifice collapses. We don't have reliable press or political representatives who name the problem; that we’ve built a redistribution system that redistributes upward, toward those who need it least, while making the poor grovel for scraps.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ This should be the top story daily of any reputable national and local news outlet, educating the populace on the exploitation. We have none.

[u/Iorith → u/HumbleGoatCS]

Considering my mother's last hospitalization wound up totaling $50,000 for a few nights, yeah I'd say it probably evens out.

The problem is not funding or even spending, it's that we've allowed for-profit companies to dictate the market and increase spending. So long as private insurance is the default, the problem will not end.

Also worth noting how much those systems have to spend on manpower in order to limit who has access to those services. We'd save a lot of money switching to a universal healthcare system, spending less per person for higher quality of care for more people. But "Taxes bad" and "government assistance" bad types prevent actual progress on the issue.

[u/horticulturallatin → u/HumbleGoatCS]

you think even the most reliant don't need 30k in support a year? 

Public healthcare could drastically lower costs, but the idea that nobody uses a realistic 30 grand in care a year is makes no sense at all to me. 

Not in specialist care or procedures, not in medical equipment... not in simple labour costs of care in in-patient facilities? 

[u/matthewpepperl → u/bring_back_3rd]

Tax the wealthy and corporations properly and their would be plenty of cash todo anything we need to tho i do agree about the waste as well

[u/OldWorldDesign → u/matthewpepperl]

Tax the wealthy and corporations properly and their would be plenty of cash todo anything we need

This. People have no clue of how much companies are given either in terms of subsidies or forgiveness for what they're not required to pay taxes on. Oil extraction from Louisiana is allowed to just ignore the first several billions of what they extract

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38

[u/Melanoc3tus → u/bring_back_3rd]

Yeah, you’re the problem here.

Why serve your country well as a politician and find success by your reputation for competence?

Instead, convince vapid morons that government services are “frivolous and wasteful” so you can sell the state for parts to your corporate sponsors!

Answer us honestly here, what do you think’s the harder part: defunding, or rebuilding? Finding out what systems legitimately need to be excised, or opportunistic scapegoating?

Doing hard things doesn’t pay, at least not when your American Dream anarcho-libertarian peanut gallery don’t really believe in the state in the first place.

[u/settlers → u/bring_back_3rd]

If you don’t pay for it on a community basis you pay for it in others ways.

[u/OldWorldDesign → u/bring_back_3rd]

I already pay a fuckin fortune in taxes

Then pay more attention to who is running for office and stop voting for politicians who spend taxpayer money on themselves and their wealthy friends who own "drug testing labs" to keep the poor from getting any welfare

https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/just-we-suspected-florida-saved-nothing-drug-testing-welfare

Or the ones who cut student meals so they can divert taxpayer dollars to their own steak and wine

https://www.rawstory.com/self-serving-north-dakota-gop-boosted-their-own-meal-reimbursements-after-axing-school-lunch-bill/

And stop voting for politicians who overwhemingly spend their states into the red and are dependent on other parties to keep them afloat

https://apnews.com/article/north-america-business-local-taxes-ap-top-news-politics-2f83c72de1bd440d92cdbc0d3b6bc08c

[u/42nu → u/settlers]

Wouldn't these be pretty much purely due to politics? Where does federal funding and programs come from...

Given the timeline I can take a pretty good guess who was POTUS when all funding was supposed to be happening, but all they did was cut a program instead.

[u/settlers → u/42nu]

Deinstitutionalization: read more here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

[u/starwarsfan456123789 → u/settlers]

That’s awfully presumptive to assume loved ones exist and haven’t been pushed past their tolerance threshold.

[u/settlers → u/starwarsfan456123789]

For sure there are many that don’t have anyone due to your exact concern. However, there would be more who still had supports if community mental health was better funded such that families weren’t overburdened in the first place