You are here: Home / BM / Black Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and White Americans: Where are the Insane Asylums When You Need Them?
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(ThyBlackMan.com) I am pro-snitching, if you see someone carjack an old lady, if you can’t shoot them, tell the authorities. I am also pro-incarceration. If you steal, rape, commit assault, battery, and homicide, I am fine with you being locked up and the key is thrown away. Last, I am pro-institutionalization for the mentally ill – sleeping on the street smoking crystal meth is not a valid treatment option.
I have some understanding of problem behaviors and mental health disorders. In fact, a major portion of my training has been a function of such, with the exception that I employ my knowledge base to prevent and reduce the spread of infectious diseases. However, what I am seeing more and more since that specific virus emerged from Wuhan, is a larger problem on a scale I would have never imagined and it regards the extent to which sociopathic and psychopathic behaviors are being practiced and overtly displayed in a collective fashion. Many decades ago, this would have not been the case, just as cashless bail, for people (wrongly or not) would have been placed (voluntarily or involuntarily) behind closed doors and lofty stone walls.
Historically, institutions the likes of Georgia’s Central State Hospital, the Athens Lunatic Asylum in Ohio (above), and Willard Asylum in New York were where we would deploy the individuals that presented the most serious threat to the community at writ or themselves, with the exception of criminals.
In theory, they were constructed to deal with the elderly the poor, and not for the mentally ill. As with government today, they were a means to an end – a way to avoid paying for the undesirables in the community to the state and the state to the federal government. However as societal advances continued, they morphed into growing the eligibility to people diagnosed with everything from mania and depression to paranoia and neurosyphilis. It was not uncommon for the so-called “slow and feeble-mindedness” and the senile to be valid targets for inclusion.
True, the state of mental health care of the period was not as astute as current approaches, but there is something said, under optimal conditions to put people away for extensive periods of time for the betterment of the social good.
Central State Hospital, described by some as the world’s largest mental institution at the time was located on more than 2,000 acres in Milledgeville, Georgia. The city and county where it was located was once the antebellum capital of Georgia and dominated by cotton and pecan production.
I am very familiar with Milledgeville because I was involved in several NIH R01-funded studies on HIV/TB risk reduction with inmates in several prisons including Rivers (below) and Baldwin state prisons. I have also spoken with people who told me stories about the institution that once worked there.
A little more detail notes that in 1837 the Georgia legislature authorized the construction of a “Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum.” It did not begin formal operation until 1842. Many of the treatment protocols used are cruel by modern standards and include electroshock therapy, lobotomies, and insulin shock, and patients including children were frequently locked in metal cages.
Although clearly imperfect, the general view was that having herds of mentally ill people walking aimlessly through the community was a dangerous prospect. They served their purpose for more than a century until the age of political correctness arose and came to a halt when President Bill Clinton signed the Mental Health Parity Act into law. Before this, health insurance companies covered mental health treatment differently than other medical conditions.
Unfortunately in this effort to address health inequity, and help more Americans get coverage and treatment for mental health conditions, it resulted in a focus on deinstitutionalization and the permanent closing of many mental health hospitals. Mainly due to big pharma pushing the use of antipsychotic medications as a cure/treatment, the desire to save money, and the fiction that all mental health hospitals were cruel, inhumane, and deadly.
Without these facilities, we have seen what happens when they are removed from civil society. On the one hand, we have seen what streets have become in places like San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles, and on the other, the festering of problem behaviors that can manifest from a nationwide collective trauma enhanced by reduced social interaction, sudden job loss, and lockdowns due to a novel viral pandemic. What we see in the aforementioned cities are the people who cannot function independently. What concerns me are the functional mentally ill who walk the streets screaming, destroying property, threatening, and actually committing violence to others.
The most common form of mental illness is the herd or mob mentality. It is the behavior displayed when some have the desire to belong and be a part of a large group for validation.
Fanatics are attracted to mob behavior because it serves as an excuse for them to ignore or suppress their individual feelings so they can adopt the behaviors and actions of the people around them with justification. So are sociopaths (individuals with Antisocial personality disorder) because they have no concern for the rights or feelings for others or a concern for what is right or wrong.
The same can be true for psychopaths because they cannot show or feel empathy or compassion for others and have the inability to control their behavior. Not to say all of the folk in these protest mobs are one of the above, but I am willing to assert that the majority have another mental disorder, and with the above denotes they all should be institutionalized – Borderline personality disorder (BPD).
Essential to understanding the herd mentality is understanding Borderline personality disorder. Individuals with BPD are very sensitive to perceived interpersonal slights, are highly susceptible to emotional contagion, and have an unstable sense of self. All of which makes them volatile emotionality and engage in impulsive behaviors that are often self-destructive and prone to social conformity. Compared to the general population they maintain significantly higher levels of suicide ideation which can result in them being more likely to escalate conflicts and marginalize the views of others – making them prioritize consensus over critical thinking and rational decision-making (herd/mob mentality or groupthink).
Huebner believed that herd mentality was a solid means for studying attributions of collectivity that make people disposed to irrational behaviors. This is reasonable given research has shown that more than seventy percent of subjects with BPD frequently engaged in violence and tend to exhibit co-morbid antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and other psychopathic characteristics. Aggression against self or against others is a central aspect of BPD.
It is my contention that what we have observed post SARS-CoV-2 is a minor, very loud, and vocal segment of the national population screaming out for mental health care. They require it so much that they are willing to act out openly, once what would have been unobservable behind closed doors and cloaked via drug abuse. They are easily influenced by what they see in the media even if it makes no logical sense.
Yes, it may be accurate to say that the left is just violent but there are other non-violent behaviors that reflect outside the 95% confidence interval behaviors that should require mental institutionalization.
Rioting and burning down property in Kenosha, Wisconsin to show support for career criminal Jacob Black, a person to keep it real, anyone would have whooped his azz if he did to one of our family members what he did to that unnamed woman (sexual felony assault and domestic violence). Just comply and drop the knife. The same can be said for George Floyd or anyone else. How does burning down and causing billions in damage across the nation serve to help or bring a person who was proven to have put a gun to a pregnant woman and threatened to kill her and her baby? Enough to trigger a mentally ill person I suggest.
Blake, Floyd, and anyone who riots on their behalf need major mental health treatment. Likewise, anyone who would tear down historic statues including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass needs major treatment. How is this any different than the Taliban destroying the historic 6th century Bamiyan Buddha statues carved into the face of a cliff in 2001 historic art it disagrees with?
People with mental health disorders like BPD, are easily influenced. One man thinks he is a woman, and more and more will think they are a woman. One man thinks they can change their sex by clicking their heels will eventually leads to 50-year-old men claiming to be transgender to race against 13-year-old girls. In the past, they would have been locked up. The same is true for criminal behavior where people see smash-and-grab robberies via the media and they are encouraged to do the same. Normal people do not do this only the mentally and criminally disturbed.
Then there are the knockout games and stealing cars (carjacking) by people as young as 13. Many even admit that randomly punching unsuspecting people in public for social media clout. Shooting a bus driver while getting off for whatever reason or mugging an elderly woman in the process of snatching her purse in broad daylight are behaviors of mentally disturbed people.
It is estimated that anywhere between 20 to 25 percent of Americans have some form of mental health issue. The majority of which reflect some form of Anxiety Disorder. I claim that these are who we see protesting at the drop of a dime for any cause, many of which are ridiculous to start. Queers for Palestine and Sex workers for Palestine are two such examples when if they were in most Muslim countries, they would be killed for being such. Chasing Jewish students into a library chanting death slogans while pounding on the doors is not normal behavior and it is as if they cannot separate Hamas from the people in the Gaza Strip as stable-minded people do.
What we face is not about a binary of picking a side, this is not a sport. Rather is about right and wrong. There is no doubt in my mind that in the past, many of the folk I have presented and described would have either been incarcerated or institutionalized. This is why I think it might not be a bad idea to bring back mental health institutions. I admit it may be an unpopular sentiment but what can I say, it is what I think. Either these folks are the dumbest people on earth, or hatred, intolerance or antisemitism is so deep, that if unchecked, it will become more than any known virus contagious. The herd mentality we see now is a form of pathology that may call for some to be institutionalized before it only gets worse.
Staff Writer; Torrance T. Stephens
Can also purchase any of his books over at; Amazon – TTS Books.
