Newsom proposes to force some homeless people into treatment
apnews.com
apnews.com
> “There’s no compassion with people with their clothes off defecating and urinating in the middle of the streets, screaming and talking to themselves,” said Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco.
I support this. You wouldn't let an infant run wild in the streets.
We should still show compassion to the mentally ill. Get them off the streets. Use force if you must. Get them the help they need.
But they are human beings and deserve compassion.
Will you still support this when, perhaps, it is a friend? There is also a bit of a national housing crisis, which may not be improved by inflation, shortages and massive global shifts.
I wish we could smell our own stink and realize that the structure of our society has consequences, often exceedingly unfair and unjustified. Beauty is a noble fondness, but a treacherous god. We should consider making stronger sacrifices before violating invaluable liberties. They don't have to be unconditional tolerance, but anything dignified I suspect will require actual work. The proposed solution is weak, cruel, too easy and unfit for my conscience.
Okay? What exactly do you mean by this? We expect force to be used in a lot of contexts.
> Will you still support this when, perhaps, it is a friend?
Be more specific?
> We should consider making stronger sacrifices before violating invaluable liberties
Again, please be more specific.
I think the proposal is common sense.
Should we work on the upstream issues? Yes.
But first let's get the adults crapping on the sidewalk into protective custody. Let's regulate it, and subject it to heavy public oversight.
> Beauty is a noble fondness, but a treacherous god.
Perfection is the enemy of the good.
2. Hubris. Don't underestimate how quickly things can change. All might be fine today, but look around... stability can be illusion. The probability of hard times seems to be rising for most.
3. Don't accept hasty final solutions, especially those easily abused. Have tolerance until a solution worthy of human dignity is devised. Forced medication isn't nice, especially when it's inappropriate.
4. Evil is another adversary of good. Sweeping humans under the social carpet and forcefully caging or drugging them against consent won't ever be good and certainly not perfect.
But I will agree that infants shouldn't be doing such things, even if they could.
I understand what you’re saying but you appear to be arguing for the status quo - which is failing.
Some people say forcing treatment is acceptable, which as a general blanket statement I disagree with.
However if you have a person who has a severe issue like later stages of schizophrenia, dementia, etc they may be in a position that they cannot make informed consent without receiving treatment that they by definition can’t consent to. I believe that the UN decided that that would be unethical, but in this case I would disagree. In the absence of initial treatment I would not consider that a person has in fact chosen not to be treated and in failing to provide initial treatment you are in effect robbing them of the opportunity to make a long term choice.
The obvious follow on question is what you do if a person with a severe condition subsequently says no to further treatment. At that point forcing treatment is clearly unethical (LGBT were forced into “treatment” into the 70s for example). Historical options have included incarceration which functionally criminalizes anything classed as a mental health problem (see again treatment of lgbt people). You could wait until they perform a criminal act, which raises the question of why you let it get to that point, etc
It seems like all the options are bad, and forced long term treatment seems clearly wrong, incarceration in a jail seems wrong, but historically mental health institutions have not been much better (and often times worse).
Non-quaker asylums were much less effective. Then the doctors started doctoring on psychotic patients... Labotomies, ECT (brain electrocution). These treatments didn't work at all. The use of ineffective treatment made Psychiatry an easy capture by the drug industry.
See my other comment in this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549579
The modern ECT protocols have very high success levels with treatment resistant depression.
Sometimes SSRI's help depression because they increase allopregnanolone in the brain [0], not because of effects on serotonin.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859433
The first-generation anti-depressants, the MAOI's, were reasonably effective at getting people out of a funk. But they didn't combine well with fine cheese [1], so when the patents expired the industry moved on to less effective drugs.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This MIA blog post says the evidence base for ECT is not very strong:
> No studies have found any evidence that ECT is better than placebo beyond the end of treatment. Nevertheless, all five meta-analyses relying on these studies have concluded that ECT is more effective than placebo, despite the studies’ multiple failings. Meanwhile evidence of persistent or permanent memory loss in 12% to 55% of patients has accumulated.
- https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/fear-loathing-ect-debat...
The data I've seen for ECT has it at an 80% effectiveness at long term remission.
Most anti-depressants do have people for who there is a addition of or increase in suicidal ideation, which is why its something prescribing doctors are expected to monitor. This is not dissimilar to heart drugs causing heart problems, etc - by design these drugs influence chemistry in the target region (and probably others because l o l multicellular organisms are complicated) so if they do induce something there's a chance it could be a not great response. So being approved shouldn't be a sign of anything nefarious - most medications have side effects MAOIs are still used today, as is lithium, neither covered by patents but the side effect profiles are much worse than many modern targeted drugs. its not just a "doesn't agree with fine cheese" its a "oh you accidentally ate too much cheese, turkey, ..., time to go to hospital" response. Similarly benzodiazepines are useful for some things (although tolerance and addiction problems mean they're avoided if possible), but those have a "whoops you had something with grapefruit? time to go to hospital" problem as well.
I'm dismissive of Allopathic Psychiatry because those doctors hurt my friend, and force her to take prescriptions to make her substance abuse problems worse. Really all she needs is sobriety, adequate nutrition, and a few basic medical interventions. But she's much more profitable as a ward who will never get better.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/malignant-gooderism/
Someone reached out to me about this piece... Said she got the postpartum depression -> postpartum psychosis, and considers the actual effects of some of the drugs she was forced to take 'torture'.
Benzo's hurt a lot of people, without actually fixing anyone's problems. The only use for a benzo is as a single-dose regimen, e.g. to help get a claustrophobic person into an MRI machine. Gamma-Hydroxybutyric Acid (GHB) is a great pro-GABA drug that crosses the blood brain barrier. It's now highly controlled because it can also be used nefariously (date rape drug). Why fix people's problems when you can create them?
> as is lithium
My friend called me up and said she'd bought herself some lithium. I strongly cautioned against it. 8 or 12 hours later she was despondent. I pointed out how she'd poisoned herself that morning and told her to throw the rest away.
She did the same with... 5HTP? Something to increase serotonin 'naturally'. She tried it multiple times, it wrecked her each time. I told her to throw that stuff away too, I think she finally did.
Depression is fundamentally a metabolic problem: sometimes nutritional, sometimes thyroid function, sometimes amplified by emotional stress, sometimes energetic ('people who are depressed are always [energetically] homolateral'). People get seasonal depression when the sun goes away for the winter. Supplemental red light can't be put in a pill (red light refreshes cytochrome c oxidase [mitochondria]). Etc.
ECT tries to reset people's brains, without doing anything else. It's a simplistic treatment that needs to be treated like calomel/quicksilver (mercury).
Palliative drugs never fix the problem. Sometimes they can be useful (Reversible MAOI's, such as Methylene Blue) while you figure out what's going on.
No one should be forcing her to take anything, so that's a problem. Also treatment for substance abuse is a challenge unrelated to issues like depression, and given addiction often is a cause of depression (due to environmental and obviously drug/alcohol interactions) treating addiction before depression is what should really have been happening. If the depression was caused by the substance abuse, then that might work - but then abuse is often a response to depression in which case the depression would still need to be treated.
> Benzo's hurt a lot of people, without actually fixing anyone's problems.
Agreed, benzos are super dangerous, and they should be prescribed only if other things fail, or for very specific reasons - I was using them for a while as my knees are shot and getting to sleep was challenging. But I'm one of those people who doesn't seem to develop addictions to drugs so I only had to deal with the obnoxious "getting to sleep" problems while coming off them. Similarly no issue with Vicodin/norco, but there's also a general problem of over prescription of opiates where simple anti-inflammatories would be sufficient.
> My friend called me up and said she'd bought herself some lithium.
Lithium is a drug you shouldn't be taking unless it's the only option as it has significant focus, etc issues. Just buying them yourself without a psychiatrist who is aware of what else has been tried would be super worrying.
> 5HTP
5HTP is glorified tryptophan, and like so many "natural", "herbal", "homeopathic", etc treatments has no evidence to support effectiveness.
Depression is not a nutrition or metabolic problem in the vast majority of cases - otherwise there would be actual data to back that statement up. People who dismiss it as being "eat better", or suggest B12 (which can cause short term improvements), light treatment (vitamin D deficiency causes a host of problems, but not severe depression) are basically saying a variation of "this is your fault for not looking after yourself better".
> ECT tries to reset people's brains, without doing anything else. It's a simplistic treatment that needs to be treated like calomel/quicksilver (mercury).
Modern studies do show it to be effective, the older "do it while awake" approach caused many problems which have lead to the long term stigma, but that doesn't magically mean modern treatments don't work.
> Palliative drugs never fix the problem.
Except they do, for many many people.
I'm sorry your friend was poorly or mistreated, but that isn't the case for everyone, and dismissing the treatments that do work for people is not helpful. Dismissing treatments that have been shown to work is similarly unhelpful.
In March 2015, I thought my new friend had substance abuse problems: methadone, heroin, cocaine, alcohol. She invited me into her world. There were a few times when I watched her make herself psychotic when she used too much cocaine, but she came out of that state when the cocaine wore off and got some food. (Ref: my comment history.)
The mental health industry captured her when she ran out of alcohol (see Mad In America link below)
When you're ordered to submit to Allopathic Psychiatry, you can't complain about the forced medications' side effects.
> Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference that he has no intention of rounding people up and locking them away. Instead, he said his plan would offer a way for people to get court-ordered psychiatric treatment, medication and housing, preferably before they are arrested.
My friend was arrested after the start of her court-ordered psychiatric treatment. She'd gotten a job, but couldn't handle the stress, self-medicated with alcohol, relapsed on meth amphetamine. Her doctors use their orders for involuntary treatment to force her to submit to medications that are specifically contraindicated for substance abuse. The probation court made her predicament even worse.
I went to a few of my friend's probation court sessions. I remember a guy who complained about his forced treatment with Abilify (antipsychotic). The judge didn't care. The next time I saw him, he was like "Abilify is the greatest drug ever!". He graduated from probation court, don't know what happened to him. Probably back in the system: Abilify causes compulsive behaviors.
After my friend had been forcibly treated for about 2+ years, all the new clients at her "dual diagnosis" drug treatment program were getting cheek swabbed. She asked for this genetic test for herself, and learned that she can't turn the provitamin folic acid (shelf stable, used to fortify food) into methylated forms of folate (Vitamin B-9, used for DNA synthesis). Her doctors don't care, and continue to force her to take anti-psychotics because that's the only way they know to treat transient psychosis.
The Mad in America Foundation posted my writeup about my efforts on my friend's behalf: Malignant Do-gooderism: The Tragedies of Allopathic Psychiatry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30388925
Someone who read the link above reached out to me over Twitter. This woman had experienced postpartum depression -> postpartum psychosis -> orders for involuntary mental health treatment. She was also in Arizona - I recognized many of the facilities she'd named.
She described what they did to her as 'torture'. She was able to escape with the help of her sister, who negotiated with the psychiatrists on her behalf, until she was able to negotiate for herself.
SCOTUS denied my petition. I intend to seek congressional oversite. I'm going to film a video to explain my earlier videos, which prove my friend was fine before she ran out of alcohol, and proving fraud on the United States Court.
Psychiatry would be exponentially more effective if they'd stop treating their patients allopathically.
Edit: Submitted a WSJ article recently, had to change the title to something less click-baity: 'Report about a case of hydrocephalus mistaken for 'mental illness'" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30354625