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Comment by moduspol | Hacker News Reader

Yet another consequence of no longer living in a high-trust society.

What I want to know is if anyone can identify when exactly the homeless issue became so bad. It was already a problem when I lived in the Bay, and when I moved back to the East Coast it had been 10 years in the making (conveniently when I was away). Clearly there a some sharp lines that can be drawn somewhere. But it's hard to get some actual answers.

Edit: rough clauding indicates it was when fentanyl took off, but idk, that doesn't seem wholly accurate.

California is a garden of eden, a paradise to live in or see.. but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got that do(ough)-re-mi.

https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Do_Re_Mi.htm

When it became unfashionable to put mentally ill people in asylums. The additional fashion of "giving local people a voice" in construction projects planning did not help either.

The problem regarding putting mentally ill people in asylums is who gets to decide who is mentally ill? I mean that's literally incarcerating people for thoughtcrime. If people have committed no crime, how can we justify taking away their freedom?

Yet strangely, we imprison people based on their intent all the time.

For years a woman ran around in traffic and was killed by a car to protect her from the state. Nothing could be done? She had to die?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Ca...

Ideally we would have a way for people who can't take care of themselves, or hold a job to be taken care of that isn't effectively putting them in prison.

Mental "asylums" that were almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than prisons is clearly bad. But just leaving people to live on the streets or end up in actual prisons isn't strictly better.

I'm not saying we should bring back the asylums, at least the way they were, but there should be a better way to take care of people who aren't able to care for themselves.

Bring them back! Yes they were bad and got abused, but not doing them is worse. Bring them back, spend so much money on them that the abuses of the system are monitored tracked reported and fixed and then fire the people who abuse the system. That takes political capital and will that doesn't exist, but the Overton window isn't going to move in its own.

Exactly and once you're in the asylum the doctors can lobotomize and drug you to the point of insanity. People used to abuse the system to get rid of family members they had an inheritance dispute with.

Also queer kids who refused to pretend to be a good little cishet

Well, historically we did this by hand waving away all that and just letting some evil system take care of it out of sight out of mind, who cares how the sausage is made if you never see the factory.

That's not really an option now since the last people to blindly believe in institutions to that extent are the boomers and it'd be a tough sell to even them.

It became unfashionable when the general public realized it was also commonly used to, say, lock up and lobotomize women for wanting to vote, or divorce their husband.

Your child is "difficult"? To the asylum it is!

Circa 2015 when the reformulation of meth made it more likely to induce psychosis — as the new flow chemistry version altered which isomers were made.

At least, in Seattle.

What is the new formulation? How does it differ at a chemical level?

It's a theory that labs in Mexico switched back over to P2P 'biker' meth (instead of the old stuff based on cough/flu meds) and that the new meth is causing progressive brain damage to users.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

It began in 1953 when thorazine was introduced on the premise that it would allow previously institutionalized people to live normal lives with only outpatient care. This turbocharged the movement to shutter mental institutions, and their populations began to crater around 1956. [0] For a lot of people, thorazine and its descendants have been nothing short of miraculous and have lived up to the promise. But not for everyone, and in the name of charity and respect for individual autonomy, we have chosen to allow these people to either live in awful conditions and fend for themselves or do something prison-worthy. So, while there isn’t great data on homelessness from before the 21st century, the root cause of much of it - a societal refusal to recognize certain people as requiring lifelong care for mental illness - begins in 1953. [0] https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...

The advert in the Wikipedia page for chlorpromazine (aka thorazine) has some... vivid imagery.

FWIW you should clarify: do you mean mentally unstable people on streets, or do you mean any form of homelessness (living in cars, surfing on friends couch, etc). Because that second category is much larger and includes a lot of sincere people who are basically just priced out of the area that grew up in

Feels like it’s been a last ten years thing in Portland too - covid locked in the whole “it’s okay for people to pitch a tent on the sidewalk and set warming fires” thing

In China, it has more to do with putting drug users into labor camps: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure-fo...

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