This came up in my health care forum.
Right now, you can legally detain someone medically when they are a danger to themselves or others for up to 72hrs. The details vary by state, but this is how we lock down individuals trying to suicide or someone mentally off the rails making threats of violence.
This variation on that law would also make opposition to Trump qualify.
Civil commitment can follow as with individuals who have profound mental illness and are not safe to be out in the world.
This is the loudest scream that democracy is dead short of hauling people out into the street and shooting them.
It’s important to note the police are currently the people who bring individuals in for the 72hr mental health holds.
It’s important to note the police are currently the people who bring individuals in for the 72hr mental health holds.
I think it is also important to note that it appears many of these officers are not wearing Level IV plates daily, and plainclothes cops may not be wearing any vest at all.
It’s also important to note that they’re planning on introducing gun control for people considered to be mentally ill. They are going to declare every antifascist mentally ill, and use it to take their guns away.
They don’t need to introduce anything, involuntary commitment is already a question on form 4473 and something a NICS check would flag.
Of course, they would still need to physically retrieve any firearms they may have. Unless they planned on handing them over peacefully.
Which is why I roll my eyes everyone those Dems mentions “Gun Control”.
Armed Minorities are harder to oppress.
What is wrong with people that they would rather live under the boot of dollar-store Hitler than in a tolerant society of people just getting on with life?
They believe the propaganda that others hate them or are trying to destroy their way of life, and that dollar-store Hitler is their champion fighting for them.
They believe that bullshit against all common sense and by very deliberately ignoring any kind of evidence. Fascists are always assholes first and the fascism just serves to rationalize their shitty behaviour.
very deliberately ignoring any kind of evidence
These are people that believe in an old beard in the sky. They’re not ignoring evidence, they’re mentally incapable of processing it. There’s a good majority of Americans that literally don’t know how to think, that think dumb ignorance is somehow cute and forgivable, that believe anything they’re told because “look at his suit.”
That’s what I don’t get. Like, why can’t we just all get on with our lives, help those you have it worse than us, and work together on a better future for our children?
But no, there’s a bunch of narcissistic assholes amassing wealth and convincing the other wannabe narcissists that everyone is out to get them.
I have a small kid and have no clue how to explain to him what the fuck was going on in right now when he’s old enough to ask. I just don’t get it. It makes me sad, and helpless, and anxious, and I just don’t want to have anything to do with the rest of society. And I don’t even live in the USA but am solid upper middle class in Scandinavia.
Hello fellow Scandinavian
I share your worries, I truly think we’re going to have war at our doorsteps sooner or later, and I don’t really know what to do about it (beyond I guess, preparing mostly self-sufficient communities of like-minded individuals capable of self-defense, but yeah…)
It’s definitively scary
They are kept isolated and ignorant by class warfare under an undermined education system, geographically and social media algorithm bubbled, have severely limited economic prospects, exposed to childhood religious indoctrination, and have normalized extreme right wing propaganda.
They believe their small town and rural economic hardships aren’t self inflicted due to lack of unions & solidarity under worker strikes & holding local politicians accountable, and take out their anger on other working class and poor people because they feel justified by their suffering to inflict suffering on their perceived perpetrators.
In pop culture references it’s Megatron feeling justified to destroy all autobots because he was deceived by a wealthy autobot leader to slave in the energon mines.
This is literally how the soviet union suppressed dissent in the 80s. Disagreement with the party was legally considered a sign of psychological issues. They did this to replace the gulags.
Psychiatric hospitals are also allowed to lie to you. You can go in voluntarily, and be upgraded to “involuntary” with no recourse.
Mental health techs will lie - cause problems? Guess what, your notes now say that you are “paranoid” and “hear voices.” You’re “paranoid” because a tech beat the shit out of you two hours ago - you don’t hear voices, but you are “crazy” so obviously lying.
Check what rights institutionalized people have in your state. I can tell you where I live, there are none.
Quite literally in my case.
PTSD from “psychiatric care” is pretty difficult to deal with (and understudied. fascinating how PTSD only garners you empathy and understanding if you’re a combat rep, despite the fact that most with PTSD do have it from sexual abuse and possibly inpatient experiences - suicide rates skyrocket after involuntary commitment, but why do any form of investigation into something that might hurt profits?)
If you’re afraid of wasps, you aren’t expected to go ask a wasp how to deal with it. If, however, you experience severe abuse at the hands of mental health professionals and you live in an area where mental health care = the police, getting any form of help is pretty difficult.
Especially when they consider your gender identity and sexuality as manifestations of mental illness/further evidence that they don’t need to look into the tech beating the shit out of you.
You’re speaking directly to me. I am a veteran with PTSD. It was from sexual assault and the accompanying involuntary mental health lock up after I went to the doctor to seek help with my sleep.
I was told I could not claim the sexual assault because I would have been kicked out for sleeping with someone that was married and for being gay (this was before they repealed don’t ask don’t tell)…… I would have been court martial and thrown out they said.
Lucky for me I’m an infantry marine with a combat tour so my PTSD gets assumed to be combat and I don’t have to explain much to anyone. But fuck, how am I supposed to go and talk this out with doctors that I don’t trust? I don’t trust the system at all. I was let down by low command (squad), middle command(battalion command), and high command (regimental command). I was then failed by the nurse (corpsman), PCP (battalion doctor), psych (some fuckface colonel), his nurse (another corpsman), and the facilities personnel (nurses, doctors, psychiatrists).
And to compound on all this, I was involuntarily locked up when I was 14(??) because my parents let me get so fucked up that I blacked out and they called cops saying they didn’t know what was wrong with me……. What was wrong was that I was 14 and handed booze and pills…… the fuck did they expect?!? Obviously both times I ended up getting released but that doesn’t remove the inhumanity of it all. The treatment as if you are “other” to them. Like a dog or some shit.
So I’ve had trauma from psych wards from adolescence and also my time in the marines.
Sorry for the rant. Just triggered so much inside me with your comment.
I have met and hung out with a staggering variety of monsters. so much so I might be doxxing myself if I really described the breadth. If you can think of a kind of monster that exists, I have probably met them. I might even have known one well.
I have never met anyone who can reach quite the degree of sadist or control freak as a psychiatrist. Psychopaths aren’t as willing to lie spontaneously and throw people away. future cult leaders aren’t as quick on the self justification trigger. I genuinely believe sydney gottlieb was one of the less malignant assholes that profession has ever produced.
which is a shame, because the pharmacology of the mind is something I’m deeply interested in. there’s cool fucking science there, and we will never see it done.
Was a mental health tech at a psych hospital. Ditto this, when it’s the nurse’s word against yours and the Ombudsman is already overworked and overwhelmed, you’re cooked.
I tried to go to bat for my patients so often, but once the nurses and the aides burn out, they stop doing the job because they care and start doing the job because it’s a job. I had nurses who told me to overchart patients so their insurance would pay more and they’d stay longer. Shady, shady shit.
This is unhinged. I hope it doesn’t pass.
