So I'm reading this book by Thomas Szasz, called "Ideology and Insanity". One of the essays in the book is online even, it's called the The Myth of Mental Illness.
It's an amazing read, more or less about how the labels of "illnesses" in psychology are often used as politically correct methods of removing or incarcerating people with "undesirable" traits or culturally inappropriate behavior.
It has a great example in it of Joseph Brodsky, a Jewish poet who was given 5 years in a soviet labour camp for the crime of "parasitism", the crime of being a writer without a "socially useful" job.
It's interesting how the same methods when tried 60 years later with better media conformity can actually lead to a repeat of something once considered "abhorrent" by other European states.
So right now our gov't is planning a country wide program where the police, not trained social workers and doctors, but the police, will be able to decide on the fly that someone is mentally ill and needs support, to whisk them off to a facility where they lose their rights, have nothing that is theirs and everything they had with them on the street is confiscated, and then they have forced retrainment of their minds to a more suitable servantlike mentality.
130 million. They are willing to pay that much to lock people up and take their freedom, but they are not willing to spend that much just making sure people have the basics. Paying actual rent and damage rates that are really available. I believe that it should be a requirement that social services actually find places for each and every person. Because no one seems to get the idea that people don't want to really live outside, but the $375 that SS is paying won't get them a place, and the rental agreement sheet they have to show a landlord is one of the greatest stigma generating devices in their entire arsenal of shame inducing methodologies.
I remember having an argument with a young business guy, never had any problems in his life, born into an upper middle class family. He's trying to tell me that all mental health patients should be made to do something useful, like pick up litter.
"That would make them feel like they are valued and contributing to society" I said.
"Picking up everyone else's shit for minimum wage would make them all feel so much more valued...."
That fat boy that was mouthing off for vanoc about their new plan, chortling with glee. Does he realize that the "shelter" pictured behind him has bedbugs and lice? That half a dozen women or more claim to have be assaulted or raped while sleeping there in the past decade? That anybody who has anything of value will lose it in their? Does he realise that he's talking about taking people to shelters that have been turning people AWAY every single day for the past 3 years? So next, to solve the "space" problem for these homeless and "mentally ill" and "addicts" we will build a camp, where they will do useful, cheap, under minimum wage manual labour such as making license plates or constructing gambling machines...and if they happen to die while in incarceration they'll be cremated at the state's "cost".
I'd also like to suggest R.D. Laing's "Sanity, Madness, and the Family"
