This is a branch-off from another topic but I felt this deserved its own topic.
Over the 150 years we had asylums, about 1m people were locked up against their will (in Canada. It's a very rough estimate because the actual numbers don't exist, of course). About 95% of the people locked up against their will were White people. This was basically a holocaust against White people by our government. Total number of residential school students? 150,000.
Where's the memorials for the asylum victims? Why isn't this taught in schools about the atrocities committed against White people by our government? Where's the national holiday? The Canadian government eventually admitted wrong-doing in the 2010. A good 32 years after the program officially ended. What they did to the people in asylums pales in comparison to anything they did in residential schools.
The government of Canada has paid $15b to Native Indians for reparations over Residential Schools and only paid $3.6b in reparations to survivors of asylums. Also, the reparations are upwards of $60b to Native Indians if you include the programs the government implemented as successors to be reparations) 150,000 total people versus 1m. How is this justice?
I made an interesting discovery on the asylum subject. A question many people ask is where did the idea even come from, why did it exist for the specific period it did, why was it global and why did it end nearly at the same time everywhere. What exactly was going on? Well, here's something to consider: Ever hear about the Tartaria Conspiracy Theory? The idea is that Old World Buildings made of stone were existing structures from a past civilization (Tartaria) and we inherited them rather than built them. People who knew the truth were thrown into asylums to hide the truth. This theory is probably not something you agree with but it got me thinking. We built all these beautiful and hand-carved stone structures in abundance and quite easily in short period of time and then abruptly stopped. What happened to all the master masons? They went from a high-paid in-demand skilled worker to nothing over night? That ought to have a pretty big impact on one's psyche... Why didn't we hear about the worker outrage over this lost industry? It wouldn't just be the direct workers either... all the people in the quarries, all the supply-chain people, all the architects specializing in those buildings, etc... If any major industry just stopped abruptly, we'd probably hear something about it. There were literally wars over the mechanization of farming ending that industry as we once knew it. Well, it just so happens that asylums were big in NA and Europe nearly the exact same time both societies started cutting down their stone construction and the asylums peak at exactly the same time stone production stopped altogether in NA and was at its lowest in history in Europe (Europe never killed it off completely and there has since been a resurgence). Many of the asylum victims were described as "transient laborers". The number of people tied to the stone-industry that was killed mostly completely in NA was well into the hundreds of thousands.
Basically, my idea is that governments were probably seeing a lot of skilled workers losing their jobs around this period of time as they were transitioning a lot of their industries from traditional methods to the new methods and asylums were developed as a means to house a lot of the people who had become destitute from the changing economy. I imagine many people tied to the stone industry found other work but I bet a lot didn't. For many, it was all their knew and all they ever wanted to know. Stonemasers in particular were a different breed. Most of their work was passed down verbally from master-to-apprentice. There was literally no real solid publicly available books (in English) on masonry until the mid 1800s yet the industry had been around for thousands of years. Stonemasons were extremely philosophical and believed their work had higher purpose/meaning than just carving some stones. The early books on stone masonery we did end up getting have tons of chapters dedicated to geometry and natural laws that almost reads like some esoteric spell book at times. There's a reason the Freemasons are what they are known for (being connected to every esoteric conspiracy theory ever) even though they started as a simply a guild for stone masons. If any group was going to be upset at their industry being killed, it would be the stone masons but I don't remember hearing about the stone mason uprising in my history books. I think a lot got thrown into asylums.
The next time someone discusses Residential Schools you should bring up the atrocities of Mental Asylums and the lack of proper response to them from our government.
This is why "bring back asylums" while a good immediate solution is just shallow thinking.
You don't want the government to be able to declare you "ill" and lock you up indefinitely.
It's a confusion of the problem, and the likely solutions v the ideal solution.
Libertarians who posture like this and have no understanding of anything beyond phrases no more complex than "government bad" deeply deserve everything bad that happens to them.
What IS the solution then, other than free range lunatics? I genuinely want to hear your take because I have started to type out 2 COAs and realize they won't work halfway through drafting them. Which is the more direct threat and more likely to happen, the government going after you (general sense) specifically for this or some psychopath out in the wild accosting you in some way?
In a nutshell, asylums with free access to members of the public to view to prevent abuses. Genuinely nuts people won't care they're being watched. And being watched is great to filter out people that shouldn't be in there, as well as providing a theoretical protection against abuse.
Yes I know the natural response to this would be to howl that I'm creating a human zoo. But there is a need for some people to be removed from society despite having committed no crime. And there is an equal need to monitor it to theoretically provide monitoring to abuses.
I can see how transparency would help, as I'm sure it could be applied to retirement homes presently. I spent some time working inpatient during my clinicals, which I guess is the closest thing you can get to a modern day asylum, for the most part. I remember learning that 72hrs was the max you could hold someone (could be extended by a judge every 3 days, if needed) and I always thought "holy shit, that isnt long enough" after rounding and interacting with some of these people. Ironically, people with borderline personality disorder scare me more than the schizophrenia, mainly because they are able to blend to a degree.
Yeah I think that the public access will actually not even help as much as people think. Once the novelty wears off, why would anyone go? People don't visit their relatives in nursing homes so why would they visit relatives in asylums? It's theoretically be possible to investigate though which would hopefully be a deterrant.
I want to hear the answer too, because as far as I can tell there isn't one. Locking up the insane is one of the few legitimate purviews of government, because regardless of what the corrupted laws and tyrannical judiciary says, there is no moral right whatsoever to be a blood hungering maniac or incurably violent retard.