Mauvaise manière
Autre exemple: la désinstitutionnalisation. Par économie, on a sorti des asiles psychiatriques, sans bien les superviser, des malades mentaux qui avaient besoin de tutelle. Incapables de se gérer, beaucoup se sont retrouvés à la rue: les refuges ont fleuri.Quand un de ces malades pète un plomb, il se retrouve au tribunal. On l’envoie aux psys, qui le libèrent presto, bien médicamenté. Désorganisé, laissé à lui-même, il cesse sa médication. Les rues, les prisons, les refuges, sont devenus des asiles. Mais on a économisé. Et menti: on a prétendu que c’est par respect de ces personnes que l’on opérait la réforme. Dans les faits, elles se trouvent humiliées, traitées pis que nos chiens.
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Les ravages des psychotiques abandonnés à eux mêmes
James Panero, City Journal
A New Moral Treatment
Humane institutionalization can help the mentally ill and protect society.
Far more frightening than episodes like that is the violence that a small percentage of the severely mentally ill inflict on society. In recent years, untreated mentally ill people have committed many of America’s mass homicides. The list includes Seung-Hui Cho, who in 2007 killed 32 and injured 24 at Virginia Tech; Jared Lee Loughner, a diagnosed schizophrenic who in 2011 killed six people and injured 14, including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords; and possibly James Holmes, who is currently awaiting trial for opening fire in 2012 on a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 and injuring at least 58. It may include, too, Adam Lanza, who last December killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. While Lanza’s condition at the time of the shootings remains a mystery, it has already been determined that he had a history of mental disorder.
Psychotic breakdowns on a smaller scale pose an even greater public concern. A 2008 study in Indiana found that 10 percent of inmates imprisoned for homicide had been diagnosed with severe mental illness, a number consistent with similar studies in Europe. Or consider the New Yorker’s recurring nightmare: being pushed under an oncoming subway train. In 1999, Andrew Goldstein, a schizophrenic who had stopped taking his medications, shoved Kendra Webdale to her death beneath a train in New York City. The incident led to the creation of Kendra’s Law, which gave New York courts the modest power to compel the mentally ill to accept treatment as a condition of living in society. (Kendra’s Law was nonetheless opposed by the ACLU.) This past December, a homeless drifter named Naeem Davis was seen exhibiting erratic behavior on a subway platform before allegedly shoving Ki-Suck Han onto the tracks and killing him. Later that month, Sunando Sen was killed the same way. Erika Menendez—a woman with “a history of psychiatric problems,” according to the Daily News—confessed to the crime.
The connection between mental illness and crime would come as no surprise to law enforcement professionals. Since deinstitutionalization, police and sheriffs’ departments have reported an overwhelming increase in mental illness–related calls, a trend that continues today. A 2011 survey of 2,400 law enforcement officials reported that responding to these calls had become “a major consumer of law enforcement resources nationally.” A TAC study in 2010 found that there were now “three times more seriously mentally ill persons in jails and prisons than in hospitals.” Many county sheriffs’ associations estimate that over a quarter of their jail population is mentally ill. The Los Angeles County Jail has become the largest de facto inpatient psychiatric facility in the United States, says Torrey; New York’s Rikers Island Prison Complex is the second-largest.
Though the proponents of deinstitutionalization claimed that it would save money, even that claim hasn’t stood the test of time. Yes, expensive institutional beds have been eliminated. But weigh those savings against the costs that must be borne by other facilities, such as emergency rooms, prisons, jails, and nursing homes. “Untreated mentally ill individuals revolve endlessly through hospitals, courts, jails, social services, group homes, the streets and back again,” reports TAC. “It is a spectacularly inefficient and costly system, perhaps best symbolized by ‘Million Dollar Murray,’ a mentally ill homeless man who cost Nevada more than $1 million, mostly in emergency department costs, as he rotated through the system for 10 years.” Consider, too, the dollar burden that the mentally ill have piled on law enforcement agencies.
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Le Kiosque a publié
– Claude Marcil et Anne Quirion
Les premiers fous? On leur a troué le crâne! Par la suite, on les a expulsés ou enchaînés, toujours pour leur bien. On montrait les plus intéressants spécimens à des touristes payants ravis.Les causes? Dieu, le diable, le milieu, le corps, l’âme alouette…. La science s’en est mêlée; vinrent le coma, les électrochocs, la lobotomie et la stérilisation. Tragédies, plusieurs échecs, quelques succès. Les premiers. Puis, en une petite dizaine d’années, on découvre des médicaments qui font effet. Des penseurs influents ont protesté: les maladies mentales n’existent pas; on ne peut pas, on ne doit pas les traiter.
Il y a une vingtaine d’années, partout en Occident, on a vidé les asiles, en promettant à la population et aux malades mentaux que jamais on ne les perdrait de vue. Puis, on a les a perdus de vue.