I was pretty with it until 4 and 5. The premise that certain groups of people without housing "can't survive without the kind of assistance that money can't buy" is condescending and elitist at best.
No, there are a huge number of people that are on the edge w.r.t. mental health. Not quite capable of handling activities of daily living and/or their own finances. Or not 100% of the time, and that fraction of the time that they can't, their money evaporates, and/or relationships evaporate.
The crisis in mental health care in the US is shameful. It is true that in the bad-old-days people were over institutionalized. So the pendulum has swung, and now unless a person is very clearly dangerous to themselves or others, it is nearly impossible to get a person resistant to treatment the help that they really need.
We talk about people "falling through the cracks", but the "crack" is a mile wide. It is pretty hard to convince me that a cardboard box under a freeway overpass is better housing than the mental institutions of old. That said, I don't think many of the mentally ill need to be forced into an institution under the old model, but we really do need a mechanism to deal with ill people resistant to treatment.
Yeah man it’s serious. Someone asked me to help an individual recently and I’m struggling to figure out how to help. He is a programmer who suffers from schizophrenia. His hallucinations got out of control until he lost his job, his life, and his kids. Social workers pretty much forced the one person in his life who cares for him (his wife) to have him removed by the police. Now he hates her. Then he proceeded to miss his hearing so he was arrested. Now he is thrown in jail. I feel guilty but I don’t know how to handle this.
I feel for you. Lacking appropriate training, it is hard for us to actually help, even though we care. The first thing to remember is that whatever you say or do will be processed through the lens of his reality. He will try to fit it into the framework of his world. The eventual fit may be very skewed. It is difficult to know how to be helpful in that situation. Sorry I don’t have more for you.
> That said, I don't think many of the mentally ill need to be forced into an institution under the old model, but we really do need a mechanism to deal with ill people resistant to treatment.
This is the mission statement right here. Very well said.
There are quite a few articles/blogs/etc out there from psychiatric professionals who were practicing before deinstitutionalization, many of whom were champions of the reforms, but who in retrospect question whether it should have happened (or at least how it was executed and how ‘community mental health’ never really took off).
Maybe it’s time to revisit the concept of mental institutions, albeit a more humane model.
> Maybe it’s time to revisit the concept of mental institutions, albeit a more humane model.
There isn't a more humane model. If you're forcing people into an institution you're also going to be forcign them to take medication and if you're not very careful there's a bunch of other restrictive practice and other bad stuff that happens. The main ones would be use of rapid tranquilisation, use of prone restraint and supine restraint, and sexual assualt from staff and other patients.
A better model would be correctly funded assertive outreach teams.
There’s a guy on my psych floor right now that, at his best, is too psychotic and paranoid to hold a job for more than a few days. At his worst - where he usually is, because his paranoia includes medications, and he believes he’s completely healthy - he’s only loosely tethered to reality. It’s a good day if he’s clothed even vaguely appropriate to the season, and manages to eat actual food. It’s not uncommon for him to eat soap because an archangel tells him this will increase his potency with women. This isn’t funny, nor exaggeration: this is how an actual real person is living and suffering.
He’s not exceptional. Psychotic disorders do that.
That you think that /describing their existence/ is “condescending and elitist” speaks mostly to the ridiculously privileged bubble you live in.
This is absolutely blowing my mind right now because 20 years ago during a significant psychotic episode I also ate soap on the advice of a glowing angelic figure who also commanded me to store samples of my own semen in a freezer in my basement. I've long since accepted those experiences as crazy edge cases in a complex brain and tied every supernatural interpretation I had to actual rational events, and I'm sure this is just an insane coincidence, but damn if it doesn't make me pause for a second. I wonder if there's some strange cultural artifact I've forgotten that both I and this fellow were exposed to that would explain this synchronicity.
Yeah thank you for your comment -- there are tons of people out there who need that kind of help, I have known some of them as well (maybe not as closely as in your profession!) and the us mental health system is not adequate
My point wasn't articulated well in my first comment. I am worried more about painting homeless people with such a broad stroke. Getting a roof over someone's head is entirely different from getting them mental health services -- we need to fix both to actually solve the problem. And the specific language around "ruiners" in the post really struck a nerve with me... I think that everyone is deserving of some degree of help and shouldn't be thrown in prison like OP suggested.
That said, I don't appreciate the personal attack. While I did find reading about your experience helpful and appreciate you sharing, I think your comment at the end is part of what makes the internet bad. Look to some of the other comments critical of my post for some better examples.
Have you met someone with severe mental retardation? My neighbor required round the clock support, often by multiple people. You could've given that girl 5 million dollars, and she would have no idea how to use it to get support. There is nothing condescending about his statement.
Many years ago, I visited a group home for people with various psychiatric issues. My girlfriend was the "den mother", and I'd spend nights with her occasionally. So I got to know some of the residents.
Anyway, these people would have been on the street, if the state hadn't provided a place for them. I particularly remember a schizophrenic guy. In the right circumstances, on safe topics, he seemed pretty sharp. But then, he was well medicated.
I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I spent nearly six years homeless.
It seems accurate to me, at least for America today. It's quite a tall order to ask society as a whole to change, though that would make life more manageable for some people currently unable to make their lives work.
It's a common misconception that humans without homes would be / are totally fine. Normal people who live in houses every day have no idea what living on the street does to someone psychologically. It's the jungle compared to our cushy lifestyles.
Sure, you can "survive", technically speaking. But living for days, weeks, years as an animal, fighting sometimes to the death for scraps, and god knows what else, it's definitely the comforts of friendship and human civility (that "money can't buy") that you're in the most need of.
There are many veterans out there who will tell anyone that they just don’t know what to do once they leave the forces. They need to have their entire weekly schedule planned out and someone to help them with that planning. Many ex-cons have the same problem, and you’ll find a similar issue with 18 year olds who are fresh out of school and pushed out their parents’s home.
This phenomenon, institutionalization, is a very real issue. For guys who have their whole life planned out daily for them and superiors to assist them with finding housing and dealing with medical care, having a load of freedom tossed at them when they’re over 40 is overwhelming. They’re not dumb. It’s just that humans have trouble adapting as we get older.
A considerable number of veteran support networks and veteran-oriented jobs exist to help people adapt to retiring during middle age.
You know, you make an interesting point. I think you're referring to the same thing that the author is referring to.
On the left side of the political spectrum, It's not a single phenomena though, I think you can break it down into two camps on the left:
1. older-school globalist liberals. Probably older, supported the Clintons, ect. These people seem to have traditionally looked down on the right as backward, uneducated "basket of deplorables" or whatever. Plays into the ivory tower liberal stereotype.
2. New-school farther left. Probably younger, fans of AOC et al. They'd also be likely to look down their noses, but in more of a moral superiority perspective.
I think the condescension of #1 goes back decades and has already borne its fruit in (at least to a degree) the political situation we find ourselves in today. I worry that group # 2 hasn't learned those lessons and is proving that they'll just repeat the same mistakes. Unless they self-destruct arguing about Israel, which totally mystifies me.
That said... so much of what comes out of the right is complete and utter bullshit. From the massive propaganda machine that is fox, to infowars, to tiny hyper-racist subreddits — there's a lot of noise to separate from the signal that might be a valid, reasonable conservative argument.
With that in mind, sometimes I wonder if we don't need a bit more contempt.
Maybe if the type of outright hate speech the mainstream right seems to support was not acceptable, that would open the floor for some actual conversation.
To summarize: I wish that democrats and the left weren't been so quick to dismiss legitimate concerns from everyone outside of NYC and SF (hyperbolic, I know). But it's right wing (and especially religiously-motivated) politics that have completely skewered our politics and media.
Saying "fuck that and fuck you" to anyone who supports that system is a reasonable reaction, in my opinion.
> Saying "fuck that and fuck you" to anyone who supports that system is a reasonable reaction, in my opinion.
Why is saying "men can't be women" considered hate speech, and "fuck you" is not. One conveys unreasoned aggression, while the other is a clumsy attempt to state objective truth.
>New-school farther left. Probably younger, fans of AOC et al
The Axiom of Choice is a political thing now? I'd have thought it generally has strong support among both sides of the political spectrum; in spite of their vocal presence online, constructivists are still a relatively small minority of the mathematical community.
1. Create content that can't be scraped. I'm not sure exactly what your "content" is in this case, but images can be watermarked, text can be given lots of references to your own brand and service, ect.
2. Submit legal requests to google to remove the content. Enough violations can get their domain blacklisted. I've done this successfully in the past for competitors using my trademark without permission to get it removed from Google. Ads.
https://support.google.com/legal/answer/3110420
3. Talk to the hosting provider, if applicable. If someone is repeatedly breaking copyright law using their platform, they may have some incentive to stop providing hosting.
Disagree with the overall sentiment. If judges make decisions which don't represent the mandate of their constituents, they can/should be removed. See the Brock Turner judge in the SF bay area. Glad he's gone!
That said, you may be right about this particular situation.
> If judges make decisions which don't represent the mandate of their constituents, they can/should be removed.
This collapses separation of powers, is against the idea that "law" and "politics" are separate things, and paves the way for removing judges who don't support the views of the Party.
But i do believe that judges should be appointed by a panel of existing judges, and once appointed, can only be removed by said panel (and not the gov't).
Just a clarification: federal judges (like the one in this article) are appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress. They are not elected and do not have constituents in the same way elected officials do.
A judge is there to interpret the law, even if the outcome isn't what the majority of people would like. Politicians are there to sway with what the majority of people want.
Often, a lower court will be bound to make a particular judgment, because of precedent. It isn't unheard of for a judgment to say "We have to decide this way, but it would be really nice if this was appealed up to someone with the authority to decide the other way".
If anyone else here on HN is a fan of talking about what "makes sense" in the context of elder scrolls, I'm a big fan of /r/TESlore on reddit. Everything from explanations like the above, to how specific enemy groups became the way they were (e.g. the falmer in Skyrim), to theories of the economics underlying the games.
I think that the barrier to entry to accepting bitcoin or cryto payments in general directly can be fairly high, depending on the ecosystem. It's been intimidating to me.
I'd love to see a collection of crypto tutorials to get started accepting payments and buying coins in any ecosystem.
I mean no offense but just want to note that a lot of these are things you can and maybe should do in your twenties. Excluding buying house of course.
Traveling, meeting new and sometimes weird people, trying drugs, etc. So maybe spending your 20s heads down in the startup world isn't great for everyone.
The Wikipedia page for the eight-circuit model of consciousness explained what it was pretty well but presented no evidence or arguments in favor of it.
Do you know of any sources that that give such arguments?
I am also curious as to how state of the art physics fits into the rest of your list. I assume it's related to the eight-circuit model and opening yourself up to the possibility that there is more to the universe than that which has been explained by science, due to it's placement in the list, but I would be interested in knowing how those concepts relate in your mind.
Like most things that involve consciousness, the evidence is personal and experiential (Which is why people use the term psuedo-science for much of the information in this domain. Ironically, I now use that label as a signal for further research as opposed to something that I would reject out of hand). In my case, when I found the 8-circuit model, it was the best framework that I had found to explain the changes to my consciousness that I was experiencing. Like anything else that purports to describe reality, it's a model (the map), it's not truth (the territory).
In terms of physics, you pretty much got it. Coming to understand that reality is much weirder and less understood than the Newtonian, mechanistic mental models that I grew up with was a revelation. I don't have actionable insights other than the relaxing of the assumption that there were authorities out there that had it all figured out.
I agree that models based on personal experiences can be helpful. The first five circuits in the eight-circuit model seem to be pretty standard psychological/philosophical thought to me, although I am not really trained in either of those disciplines.
However, things kind of go off the rails when the sixth circuit directly claims that LSD enables telepathic communication. At this point the map enters the territory of things that are scientifically testable and as far as I know, telepathy has been tested many times and never proven.
Circuit eight is similar with it's claims of non-local awareness at the human conciousness level.
I am in favor of relaxing the assumption that everything has been figured out but this model instead appears to be throwing out the scientific method. I understand that it's a map used to describe the territory of consciousness but I don't see how it's a very useful map unless you're already assuming that consciousness is not 100% in the physical brain.
Such an assumption runs counter to the current (majority) scientific thought which, as you say, is not necessarily a bad thing. However, without any evidence presented that give reason to think the assumption might be true, I see no reason to follow this model more than I see a reason to follow a model that says God created the universe in seven days or that a race of sentient super-intelligent Beavers chewed the universe out of the fabric of the space time continuum.
...and somehow missed the most important thing of the humanity: have some children, raise them as proper humans and pass them your knowledge and wisdom.
All the above points have their share of being somewhat important, and certainly help to live a life as close to reality as possible, but children tops everything out.
This is a great point. I started that list with leaving SF, but you're absolutely right that having kids is truly what started turning my ship in a whole different direction.
I agree with point 5 and 4, it's a bit of a bandwagon.
However the article doesn't contain the quote you mentioned in point 3. Also, the only reported death due to Theranos that I can find is the sad death of the Chief Science Officer who killed himself.
I disagree with the premise that she should be fired. Reporters pitch stories all the time with specific premises... I'm trying to imagine taking what she wrote and putting into any kind of coherent narrative. It's not the kind of thing that would have made an impact, I don't think.
