I’ve been in bins and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a fucking documentary.
My own experiences in 1980 and 1982 were a whole lot like what was portrayed in the movie and folks in the psych patients’ liberation movement (against forced treatment) continue to testify that it hasn’t improved much in the ensuing decades. The only thing that’s changed in a major way is that more forced treatment occurs outside instead of inside locked-door institutional settings and involuntary incarcerations are generally shorter in duration. (that, at least, is a good thing)
This is what I remember. Also, by my understanding, community outreach centers were supposed to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, they (we) never got around to adequately funding them.
I’m aware of the difficulties. I’ve seen the whole spectrum from ‘I know the voices are not real. But, they are real annoying!’ to ‘of course they’re real’.
I disagree with your last statement. I’ve known a few people who were aware that they were hallucinating, yet could not resist the urge to interact with their hallucinations.
Interesting.
Also, in Shakespeare, mad Lear addressing blind Gloucester; Macbeth “is this a dagger I see before me,” the ghost of Banquo, and the parade of the slaughtered by the Witches; and the first appearance of the Ghost in Hamlet come most quickly to mind.
Well, perhaps you are in a “real” urban area, with no land that is not built on or managed, and possibly lethal cold in the winter.
See, I’m in California. None of my homeless friends ever stay in shelters, ever. Nor do they ever pass the time in a public library, just for someplace to be. They pretty much all have surreptitious camps in places which I have decided not to delineate here, but are probably not found in big cities. They are marvelously innovative that way. Several years ago, I knew a guy who built himself a two-room cabin out at the landfill, with a solar shower and a vegetable garden. The city eventually came and bulldozed it.
I’ll never forget one time a lady I used to know said to me, “When regular people go on vacation, they go camping. When WE go on vacation, we get a hotel.”
Seconding Brujaja’s point: the most visible of the homeless are the mentally ill/homeless-by-choice people.
But there is a, probably large, homeless population that assiduously, and generally successfully, avoids being enumerated as “the homeless”: people whose homes were destroyed or irreparably damaged by natural disaster, and who had no or inadequate insurance to replace it – this is particularly true of poor people who were renters; homeless adolescents who have left untenable home situations; people evicted for one reason or another who were unable to find somewhere else to move to… Though many of these people are in one sense technically not ‘homeless’ in that they are temporarily staying with family or friends, that is almost always not a good long-term solution.
We were in this situation not quite four years ago, when a tree irreparably destroyed our home nine days after we’d paid a month’s rent, and the officious County Health Department declared our home unlivable and ordered us out of it. After a panic-stricken weekend, we were rescued first by the kindness of one of Barb’s coworkers, who put us up for several months, then by the generosity of Dopers plus a tax refund enabling us to find a new rental and pay the assortment of deposits, rents, etc., that allowed us to take residence there.
We were more fortunate than many; some years earlier, two of “our boys” were half of a foursome sharing a small one-bedroom apartment when we opened our home to them. And even with their willingness to work, and work hard, two 17-year-old boys could not find jobs that would allow them to rent even an inadequate place for the two of them. This sort of stuff doesn’t get documented, because the last thing any of them wants is the bureaucracy telling them what they have to do, or deciding a residence has too many people staying in it. And it’s all too easy for the rest of us to adopt an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude.
You know, it has suddenly occurred to me that giving schizophrenics cellphones to use when talking to the voices could actually be a powerful tool psychologically – because it enables you to hang up on them.
There are some areas in Spain where “tool sheds” at vegetable gardens will have a bathroom, kitchen, between one and three bedrooms; they’re commonly used as summer homes, or for family gatherings. I know people who, after the last time they found it broken into, just leave it unlocked; usually it will just have been broken into and used, nothing stolen. I know someone who leaves a note stating “please switch the lights off when you leave. Thank you.”
I’ve been in bins and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a fucking documentary.
My own experiences in 1980 and 1982 were a whole lot like what was portrayed in the movie and folks in the psych patients’ liberation movement (against forced treatment) continue to testify that it hasn’t improved much in the ensuing decades. The only thing that’s changed in a major way is that more forced treatment occurs outside instead of inside locked-door institutional settings and involuntary incarcerations are generally shorter in duration. (that, at least, is a good thing)
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Bolding mine. Unless you stick to the past tense, the post is wrong. Your bins versus my bins. Your bins versus current US law.
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The post to which I was replying was discussing things that happened when Ronald Reagan was prez. My experiences were contemporary with that.
Edited to Add: and forced treatment hasn’t gone away. We’ve won more protections but not enough to protect folks from invasive mind-altering treatments they do not want