Doesn’t shock me tbh. The “deinstitutionalization movement” was a fucking joke all they did was dump people out on the street so they could use their 0 community living skills to go get their mental Healthcare from prison instead, and now that people are getting sick of being screamed at on the street by homeless schizophrenics on drugs (not like there’s anything better for them to do) they want them locked up again so they can make health insurance companies money instead of doing literally anything to actually heal their communities. I have an entire nursing theory and set of practices just for this specific population because we’ve just completely fucked so many of them up, probably most of them permanently. And I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face but housing is the #1 driver of the American mental health crisis. They joke about “what radicalized you” and it’s 8 fucking years of working in psych hospitals even when I’m proud of the care I’m giving just watching the system as a whole is killing me. What I do should be considered ICU level psych care for that handful of people who are actually actively psychotically tweaking so why are all of the units I work mostly full of not even depressed but just understandably sad homeless people?
This is not really even about that because yes, people are being held in these places involuntarily, but a lot of people voluntarily check themselves in- Acadia even works on propaganda to get them to do it- and then can’t leave. People who want things like an evaluation for bipolar disorder or an adjustment in medication or just plain old therapy.
No that’s 100% exactly what I’m talking about because no one should be going to psych hospitals for any of those things, and the fact that we’ve not allocated the resources to treat those things in the community (which would actually be cheaper) is the entire failing of that “deinstitutionalization” movement. It was supposedly going to be a whole movement where we shifted to community care models but they never actually allocated proper funding for that so it became just another way to fuel the prison industrial complex.
I’ve never even worked a psych hospital that did proper 1:1 talk therapy on the regular. I as a nurse working a 12h shift with 6-8 patients and also being responsible for equipment checks, groups, checking on all my patients at least hourly etc am often the closest thing some of these people get to a therapist. At the absolute MOST most of those things should be being treated at a CSU which is a type of voluntary stepdown unit that usually has 1 nurse on-site continuously and that does a cursory belongings search and NO body searches. Most of them function like rehabs but do other mental health services as well as detox. I shouldn’t be being asked to strip search depressed people, but I also can’t risk one of them being dumb enough to bring a proper sharp or ligature onto my secure unit for people who genuinely can’t be trusted not to shank or garotte a bitch. Ffs one time the ER just didn’t even check at all and an actively psychotic pt rolled onto the unit with a loaded fucking gun in their bag that my tech just happened to find during a routine belongings search and I’ve found all kinds of other weapons on people. My unit is tightly controlled for a reason and most people receiving psychiatric care don’t need it and therefore should never gave to experience it.
Almost none of the people you’re describing should be setting foot on even the classier units I’ve worked, and they wouldn’t have to if proper community resources like medication management, talk therapy, and even CSUs were more available. I remember reading at one point that there was like one psychiatrists office serving like half of Montana at one point. The lack of those services (and particularly the lack of adequate insurance reimbursement for those services - those professionals still need to feed and house themselves and their families) are a very intentional component of this fucked up orphan crushing machine.
Yeah. And they’re volunteering to risk something that’s at least horribly traumatic and at worst just a straight up human rights violation because they don’t have any better places to go and that’s by design.
Doesn’t shock me tbh. The “deinstitutionalization movement” was a fucking joke all they did was dump people out on the street so they could use their 0 community living skills to go get their mental Healthcare from prison instead, and now that people are getting sick of being screamed at on the street by homeless schizophrenics on drugs (not like there’s anything better for them to do) they want them locked up again so they can make health insurance companies money instead of doing literally anything to actually heal their communities. I have an entire nursing theory and set of practices just for this specific population because we’ve just completely fucked so many of them up, probably most of them permanently. And I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face but housing is the #1 driver of the American mental health crisis. They joke about “what radicalized you” and it’s 8 fucking years of working in psych hospitals even when I’m proud of the care I’m giving just watching the system as a whole is killing me. What I do should be considered ICU level psych care for that handful of people who are actually actively psychotically tweaking so why are all of the units I work mostly full of not even depressed but just understandably sad homeless people?
This is not really even about that because yes, people are being held in these places involuntarily, but a lot of people voluntarily check themselves in- Acadia even works on propaganda to get them to do it- and then can’t leave. People who want things like an evaluation for bipolar disorder or an adjustment in medication or just plain old therapy.
No that’s 100% exactly what I’m talking about because no one should be going to psych hospitals for any of those things, and the fact that we’ve not allocated the resources to treat those things in the community (which would actually be cheaper) is the entire failing of that “deinstitutionalization” movement. It was supposedly going to be a whole movement where we shifted to community care models but they never actually allocated proper funding for that so it became just another way to fuel the prison industrial complex.
I’ve never even worked a psych hospital that did proper 1:1 talk therapy on the regular. I as a nurse working a 12h shift with 6-8 patients and also being responsible for equipment checks, groups, checking on all my patients at least hourly etc am often the closest thing some of these people get to a therapist. At the absolute MOST most of those things should be being treated at a CSU which is a type of voluntary stepdown unit that usually has 1 nurse on-site continuously and that does a cursory belongings search and NO body searches. Most of them function like rehabs but do other mental health services as well as detox. I shouldn’t be being asked to strip search depressed people, but I also can’t risk one of them being dumb enough to bring a proper sharp or ligature onto my secure unit for people who genuinely can’t be trusted not to shank or garotte a bitch. Ffs one time the ER just didn’t even check at all and an actively psychotic pt rolled onto the unit with a loaded fucking gun in their bag that my tech just happened to find during a routine belongings search and I’ve found all kinds of other weapons on people. My unit is tightly controlled for a reason and most people receiving psychiatric care don’t need it and therefore should never gave to experience it.
Almost none of the people you’re describing should be setting foot on even the classier units I’ve worked, and they wouldn’t have to if proper community resources like medication management, talk therapy, and even CSUs were more available. I remember reading at one point that there was like one psychiatrists office serving like half of Montana at one point. The lack of those services (and particularly the lack of adequate insurance reimbursement for those services - those professionals still need to feed and house themselves and their families) are a very intentional component of this fucked up orphan crushing machine.
They were tricked into going there. You seem to be missing that. That isn’t legal. Most of the things in the article aren’t legal.
Yeah. And they’re volunteering to risk something that’s at least horribly traumatic and at worst just a straight up human rights violation because they don’t have any better places to go and that’s by design.