The State and Mental Illness Patients

[Travis Retriever]

I've had this on my mind for at least half a year now.
I've been meaning to share this with Shane and the rest of the board for that time.
The idea is that we need the State to handle mental patients and the like was given to me by my Psychology professor.

The story went something like this: something odd about U.S. culture is our attitude towards the mentally disabled.
During the 1800s (or some early time like that), we would send them to a rural area around the south and forget about them.  As time went on the place would fill up.

To illustrate what happened next:
He got us to picture a guy wanting to make a profit who paid to have huge institution (building) built on land (I assume this happened around the 1920s to 1940s: he didn't give us an exact date), to where families could send their disabled/mentally retarded children/family members to.  They would "send them there and forget about them."  The idea was that having a child like that was a sign of bad parenting, so getting rid of them was the best thing they could do (according to the family's perspective).  Because these Institutions (as they were called) were not accountable to anyone, they kept making them more and more cramped until the point where each person would be literally chained to the walls a few feet from the other.  The guy who had the place built would have a check sent to him every month or so.  The guy running the place (whom my prof dubbed, "Bubba") would have no qualms with torturing and hurting and even sexually abusing the people inside.  There was often screaming around those places, and (during the 50s) parents would often tell there kids that, "if you don't behave, you'll end up there, with the crazy people."


He also described instances of corruption that led to people getting in that place that were not "mental" to begin with.  An example to  Ex.  A man and rich woman are to be wed.  The man has another woman whom he loves.  So he marries the rich women, but later bribes a doctor into diagnosing her as "insane" or something, and a judge to put her in one of those institutions (or something like that).  So he then divorces her, takes half (or all) of her money, and elopes with the woman he actually loves.

Later on, the laws were changed; only people who were, "A danger to themselves or to others" could be put into one of those places.
Because many of the people were mentally broken, they became the homeless people who live in many of our cities to this very day.

Now the guy who had the place built in Florida, because of the massive decrease in people able to be there no longer wants to run the place.  So the State had to buy it from him for a HUGE sum of money, and now runs it to this day...

I bring this up to you, because I would imagine you, Shane, would have looked into this kind of stuff, especially having a special needs child of your own.  What's your take on this?
I already know his point about the judge and doctor just screams corporatism.  As with Slavery, you probably know the full story here.
I'd like to hear it from you.

[MrBogosity]

I don't know about that particular story. It sounds like, in addition to corporatism, the judge and the doctor are steeped in Lamarckian eugenics.

[Travis Retriever]

I don't know about that particular story. It sounds like, in addition to corporatism, the judge and the doctor are steeped in Lamarckian eugenics.

As I said, it was an example, my professor said this was a normal thing country wide for decades until the State intervened and got the profit incentive out of it.