To be at first glance but not actually contrarian: we are not putting enough people (who should be there) into psychiatric hospitals. This is not exclusionary of the idea that people are winding up in mental asylum who should not be there. Rather, the two are complimentary: poor diagnostics and lack of accountability, as well as limited resources, ensure that there are likely large amounts of both “should not be institutionalized but are institutionalized” and “should be institonalized but are not.”
I do not live in the United States, but in a similar Western democracy and worked for a year in a health bureaucracy that contracted psychiatrists to work in mental hospitals. The doctors were under great pressure, due to lack of funding, to release people as soon as possible, whether or not mental health support was available in the community they would be returning to (in most cases, this meant “the street/homeless shelter”). As a result, relapse/readmission was near constant.
As to what prevents them from becoming a constituency for the modern left—even when many of them are ethnic minorities—the reasons identified below are cogent, and I would add, to judge from the people we dealt with in my job, the mentally ill are unpleasant/unsettling to deal with. I know many people who will talk about their grad school depressions as a major mental illness, but they have nothing on the cases the psychiatrists I worked with handled. Serial arsonists, people who habitually ate glass and metal, others convinced that all indigenous people were possessed by the devils and lashed out at them at every opportunity.
The mentally ill are also often the cause of many other (politically preferred) social problems. Recently, in my city, there were a string of verbal assaults and physical intimidations of Muslim women at transit stations. After widespread condemnation of these attacks and community groups talking about the need to “raise awareness” , with an implicit assumption that the actors were many, the police figured out the attacks were the work of two mentally ill men with long histories of on again/off again institutionalization. The attacks stopped and the issue disappeares from the news. To be blunt, no one gains anything from directing attention at the mentally ill.
To be at first glance but not actually contrarian: we are not putting enough people (who should be there) into psychiatric hospitals. This is not exclusionary of the idea that people are winding up in mental asylum who should not be there. Rather, the two are complimentary: poor diagnostics and lack of accountability, as well as limited resources, ensure that there are likely large amounts of both “should not be institutionalized but are institutionalized” and “should be institonalized but are not.”
I do not live in the United States, but in a similar Western democracy and worked for a year in a health bureaucracy that contracted psychiatrists to work in mental hospitals. The doctors were under great pressure, due to lack of funding, to release people as soon as possible, whether or not mental health support was available in the community they would be returning to (in most cases, this meant “the street/homeless shelter”). As a result, relapse/readmission was near constant.
As to what prevents them from becoming a constituency for the modern left—even when many of them are ethnic minorities—the reasons identified below are cogent, and I would add, to judge from the people we dealt with in my job, the mentally ill are unpleasant/unsettling to deal with. I know many people who will talk about their grad school depressions as a major mental illness, but they have nothing on the cases the psychiatrists I worked with handled. Serial arsonists, people who habitually ate glass and metal, others convinced that all indigenous people were possessed by the devils and lashed out at them at every opportunity.
The mentally ill are also often the cause of many other (politically preferred) social problems. Recently, in my city, there were a string of verbal assaults and physical intimidations of Muslim women at transit stations. After widespread condemnation of these attacks and community groups talking about the need to “raise awareness” , with an implicit assumption that the actors were many, the police figured out the attacks were the work of two mentally ill men with long histories of on again/off again institutionalization. The attacks stopped and the issue disappeares from the news. To be blunt, no one gains anything from directing attention at the mentally ill.