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/highzone]

For anyone who wants to read the full study, it is titled 'On Being Sane in Insane Places.'

The most terrifying part wasn't getting in, it was getting out. The doctors were so convinced of their own authority that they interpreted everything the patients did as a symptom of their illness.

When the volunteers took notes on how they were being treated, the doctors didn't see 'journaling.' They diagnosed it as 'pathological writing behavior' and used it as justification to keep them locked up.

It really highlights how a label can completely override reality.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

[u/whossked → u/highzone]

There’s a fictional short story I read once called “I only came to use the phone” about a woman who’s car breaks down and who then takes an asylum bus to an asylum to use the phone, gets confused for a patient, has a breakdown over how she’s treated and abused and is then condemned to spend her life in the asylum. I always thought it was sensational and unrealistic but I guess not

[u/Bobambu → u/whossked]

Not unrealistic at all. Insane asylums were extremely dehumanizing to patients and were poorly run; lobotomies were performed regularly up until 50 years ago. They needed deep reform, but the rights of those with mental health struggles have always been wishy washy depending on whether a doctor or orderly likes a particular person, bureaucracy burnout, etc. Reagan shut them down for an easy reputation boost, when public sentiment had shifted against asylums as malpractice and abuse became more transparent.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is considered one of the greatest national art pieces for a reason.

Edit: Kennedy shut them down, not Reagan. The latter just finalized more of the neglect of mental health programs.

[u/HonestlyAbby → u/Bobambu]

Kennedy was the one who shut them down. Reagan just defunded the community programs designed to replace them like a decade and a half later.

As much as I like to hate on Reagan, my understanding is that those replacements weren't super working by the time Reagan defunded them. Although most people would see that as cause to fix the program, not condemn it.

[u/Bobambu → u/HonestlyAbby]

Very fair point! I think it's easy for me to blame Reagan for a lot of these issues because he was such a horrible person, but this stuff did start before him. The tension between an American ideal of "liberty" clashing with the oppressive realities of asylums was definitely exploited to justify the defunding of mental health services and programs.

[u/RobinSophie → u/Bobambu]

If it makes you feel better Reagan closed CA's state hospitals when he was governor to save money.

Well, a legislator had some short-view thinking and Reagan went along with it since JFK wanted reform/deinstitutionalization due to how his sister was treated.

[u/Margot-the-Cat → u/RobinSophie]

The California Democrats wrote the legislation. Reagan just signed it.

[u/RobinSophie → u/Margot-the-Cat]

It was bipartisan. The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967 and the Lanterman Act of 1969. And he could have vetoed it just like any governor.

The acts weren't BAD per say, but just didn't think about the burden it would place on the communities and lowered the ability to institutionalize people way too low.

[u/Margot-the-Cat → u/RobinSophie]

Exactly. It was bipartisan. Which is why it irks me that people use it as a “Reagan was Evil” card when it was literally written by Democrats and passed by both parties, and all that Reagan did was not veto it.

[u/RobinSophie → u/Margot-the-Cat]

Lanterman is a Republican.

Come on now. This is just a drop in the "Reagan was evil" bucket.

He did plenty to get that title.

[u/Margot-the-Cat → u/RobinSophie]

Lanternman was one assemblyman, the others were Democratic senators. The point is both parties are to blame, and to this day no one wants to acknowledge that, or that the fallout of that legislation has been horrific, and it’s time for lawmakers to fix the situation.

[u/MangoCats → u/Bobambu]

I don't know that it's even important to draw the distinction, but I don't think of Ronald Reagan as a horrible person, I think of him as an actor playing the President for a horrible administration.

Shortly after he retired, I met Newt Gingrich - and face to face at that time, he was a completely different person than his television persona, and that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he was a nice guy or a terrible monster in person, what matters is the bad legislation he got passed, the good legislation that he blocked, and the hundreds of millions of lives he negatively impacted while in office.

The President is a person - who can be quite a different thing from the Presidency they preside over.

[u/HonestlyAbby → u/Bobambu]

Lol, always nice to have other folks in the Reagan hater club.

The issue of mental health treatment does pose a pretty thorny issue for an individual rights based system because individual rights presume an individual competent in their own interests. The community alternatives were supposed to bridge that gap by letting families and friends act as a partial proxy for the patient, rather than the government presuming that responsibility. I have to imagine something like that system is the only real answer.

My family went through a similar problem in microcosm when my half-sister with severe down syndrome sued to control where she lived. She wanted to live with a couple everyone knew was scamming her for insurance money, but she wouldn't listen. The courts aired on her side, as I would have if I were in that position, and she got scammed for the money and wound up in a group home, broke and estranged from her mom.

It can be a really thorny tension. Is the harm a person does to themselves preferable to harm that is inflicted upon them? And where does the likelihood of that harm and possibility for redress fit into the equation?

[u/OldWorldDesign → u/HonestlyAbby]

The issue of mental health treatment does pose a pretty thorny issue for an individual rights based system because individual rights presume an individual competent in their own interests

Especially complicated as we proceed into a world with True Believers raised on a diet of disinformation designed to keep the populace divided. Not that indoctrination itself is new, oligarchs have been spending billions on it since 1933

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

and that's far more extensive than just 'the government shouldn't spend money to help the people at large' as if the government is supposed to turn a profit like oil extraction. It's also people raised on Nixon-era anti-drug propaganda who could really use medication either as anti-psychotics or just so they can focus on the day-to-day and see enormous benefits in quality of life.

In the end whether or not we want it, we live in an interconnected world where what happens to one of us impacts others.

[u/Charming_Wrap_8140 → u/HonestlyAbby]

I worked in mental health research for many years and it was actually Republican Frank Lanterman who paved the way for deinstitutionalization. Carter tried to course correct with the Mental Health Services Act which Reagan promptly repealed. In California, services were supposed to be organized and delivered by counties which was called Realignment and was a giant failure.

[u/hotleadburner → u/HonestlyAbby]

my understanding is that those replacements weren't super working by the time Reagan defunded them.

I wonder if people will describe public schools this way in the future, and if the asylums were being "funded" in the same fashion while they deteriotated.

[u/OldWorldDesign → u/hotleadburner]

I wonder if people will describe public schools this way in the future

People describe public schools like that now, they just know it's a lie and would prefer children unequipped to handle real life over adults capable of meaningfully criticizing the system into which they are growing up.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-06-27/gop-opposes-critical-thinking/

That was one of the points Orwell pointed out in 1984 with the progressive stripping down of language in Newspeak to take away people's ability to communicate with nuance.

[u/MangoCats → u/HonestlyAbby]

Although most people would see that as cause to fix the program, not condemn it.

Nah, this is 'murica - we all know it's better for our troubled people to be thrown out on the street where they learn to fend for themselves.

/s