- FLORIDA’S STATE-FUNDED MENTAL HOSPITALS are supposed to be safe places to care for people who are a danger to themselves or others. But years of neglect and deep budget cuts transformed them into treacherous warehouses where violent patients roam the halls with no supervision and workers are left on their own to oversee dozens of people. Now, no one is safe inside.
Invisible is such an interesting choice of words. One of the problems with urban America is that our mentally ill are hyper-visible -- you see them every time you sit at the access road waiting to get on the highway, and every time you leave the bank or grocery store, and a million other places. Modern mental hospitals, while surely not all stereotypically horrifying, seem to find it hard to gain a middle ground between visible and invisible. I haven't read the article but I hope I get time to.
Oregon only has one public hospital to serve the mentally ill but it's actually a good thing. The mentally ill who aren't in jail or homeless live in the community. There is a 14 bed residential clinic for schizophrenics right near the shop. Two of the residents are regulars, they are both pretty far out depending on the day but they like to come in, get a coffee and socialize. I give them a generous discount, they live in about $5 a day. About half of them are occasional customers. They are sometimes disruptive. Every once in a while they bring a group of them over for coffee. They all get their coffees and each sits at a different table facing in the same direction. They all look slightly to extremely bizarre. People come in and there are all these weirdos facing in the same direction staring in space, its a weird scene. The scariest looking guy, who is actually a pretty nice fellow, had a real bad day yesterday. He came in the shop several times saying slightly incoherent challenging things, it was a little disturbing, but I like him and hope he gets back in his feet. Another guy who lives in an alternate reality if you get to know him. He comes in all the time for coffee or a cookie. Many of the regulars have got to know him and take a minute to say hello to him. A few people have been banned for being a pain in my ass. A few of them have violent criminal records but they don't seem to be a threat in their current situation. Stable housing and monetering seem to help them live reasonably decent lives (if being institutionalized for life is any way to live). One of my favorite of these guys who lived in a different group home a few blocks away died last week. I had been dropping an occasional cup of coffee off at his home for a week or two and then he quit answering his door. He was old and had become too sick to come to the shop. Didn't know if he was hospitalized or dead until I ran into his caseworker... Cya Craig, you were a nice guy. It seems like a good thing that these folks are part of the community, doing things other than rotting in a mental prison, glued to the TV. Some of them are inconvenient, others are sweet and decent despite the fact that their brains impose a life of fear and uncertainty on them. It can costs less to give them a place to live and and appropriate level of care when compared to jail the streets and the emergency room. That shouldn't be the reason that they be cared for with some degree of decency by it's a compelling reason. It's visibility without the misery. People in the business tell me about the dysfunctions of the system but it's not an easy community to serve and bureaucracy has trouble with the nuance of the people it's trying to help.
Good stuff. Sometimes, yeah. Schizophrenia is a weird one. If you're on your meds, it tends to just mean "weird." If not, very bad things happen. From a public integration perspective, there are far worse mental illnesses. There is no one-size solution. There is such a thing as a retirement home/assisted living for the mentally ill, but in my experience they're prohibitively expensive. The state solution, on the other hand, tends to be regimented, bureaucratic, and often completely misses the point. The ideal, home care by the family, is no longer really possible.It seems like a good thing that these folks are part of the community, doing things other than rotting in a mental prison, glued to the TV.
I thought I had shared this but apparently not. I want you to know I am working my way through reading every single article on this page. I will not watch the videos. I don't know about time and I don't know about ability to watch them without being sicked. I'm not a big video person. I have been reading these articles every night. They are awful, horrific, eye-opening, and important. That is all I want to, or can, say at this point. This makes me see things like r/FloridaMan in an entirely, entirely different light.
A bit meta for the article, but w/e: So the Mental Health Association of Central Florida (MHFCA) luncheon I volunteered at in June had some more to say on the topic of Florida's government screwing over the mental health field in comparison to others, no less. The first article here says we're ranked 49th out of all 50 states. This is no news. Candice (Head of MHACF) said the new ranking is dead last, but I've yet to see a report on it. The previous years alluded to at the end here refer to the comparison of Texas's $100mill increase in mental health budget juxtaposed to our decrease. Also, screw Rick Scott.In a few states, ugly political wrangling ended with mixed results. In Florida, which is ranked 49th in state funding for mental health, the governor had proposed a nearly $22 million increase to the state mental health budget. Infighting in the legislature left the state with a modest increase for community mental health services, hardly enough to o set the massive cuts that have taken place in previous years.