Journal GMontag's Journal: Szasz not Reagan! 4
I hope my Lovely Lefty Nancy finds this! We have discussed this in bits and pieces for several years now, with neither of us having much research backing up our positions. The only fact we both had accurate was that a lot of 'homeless' people need to be in hospitals.
Jonah Goldberg at The Corner has a quick recap of how these patients were set loose on the streets of NYC. Other cities did the same thing.
Derb - I've grown to appreciate Szasz a lot more than I used to, but I was starting from a very low base. At the theoretical level, I think he's got a lot of interesting things to say. But as someone who grew up in Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s and saw the real-world effects of some of his ideas put into practice, I think the man has a lot to answer for. In the 1970s, a coalition of leftwing and rightwing civil libertarians, budget cutters and finger-in-the-wind politicians released thousands of dangerous, mentally sick, people onto the streets of New York. Perhaps more than any other intellectual, Szasz was responsible for this movement. He lent credibility to, among other things, the idiotic moral equivalence argument that America put its political dissidents in mental hospitals just like the Soviets. He argued that mental disease was a political category. "`Mental illness' is [only] a metaphor," he wrote. "Minds can be `sick' only in the sense that jokes are `sick' or economics are `sick'." When Szasz's children, as it were, were released from the mental hospitals they set up camp all over the city, defecating in the street, scaring little kids, living in parks, taking drugs and generally causing great harm to civil life and to themselves. Of course, the leftwing press immediately hailed the "homeless" as economic victims, particularly when Ronald Reagan came to power. They weren't crazy! They were the dross of industrial capitalism, the lumpen proletariat, the victims of "Reagan greed." The media's treatment of homelessness in the 1980s was one of the great journalistic frauds of our age, rife with all sorts of weak-tea Marxist nonsense.
Regardless, I agree with you that there's much nonsense in psychiatry. And I think it's telling that a profession which was willing, to some extent, to write off truly sick poor people is constantly inventing new mental illnesses for rich kids.
But, while it's all fine in some seminar on Foucault to claim the woman who slept in her own filth not 100 yards from where I grew up, and who scratched my brother's face as he walked-by was really just a maverick from bourgeois norms. And it's fine to write a term paper on how Larry Hogue was some kind of political dissident. But in the real world, the idea that mental disease is just a political metaphor is nonsense, dangerous nonsense.
He continues here:
Szasz & The Homeless Cont'd [Jonah Goldberg]
From a reader:
Jonah,
Yes, it's true, I was a PhD candidate in psych at Columbia during the 1970's, though I'd rather that not be widely known. I worked only two years in the profession before finding more grown-up things to do.
My recollection is that the release of these badly-behaved folks from the hospitals and institutions wasn't, per se, the bad deed - it was, rather, the transfer to the infamous SRO hotels. This created concentrations of these people in buildings where they drove each other nuts. Sort of like cloning the institutional environment but with no attendants.
It was pretty bad, though, on the Upper West Side during that time. We all have anecdotes, right?
Me: Yeah, the SRO (Single Room Occupancy) thing was a bad idea. Basically they took old hotels and residential buildings and warehoused crazies in neighborhoods like mine. But I think this was just one aspect of a cascading series of stupid decisions. Another was that the laws for forced commitment were absurd or non-existent. So crazy people could avoid arrest on grounds that they were insane (or simply because cops didn't want to do the paperwork), but they couldn't be put in mental hospitals without their consent. A great book on all of this is Madness in the Streets which covers the entire sorry episode in New York's history very well.
Anyway, booting insane people onto the street began without Reagan, but he got the blame for it of course. Just like the "blame" for Vietnam falls on the Republican who pulled our troops out, not the Democrat who sent them in.
Crazies (Score:2)
That about sums up the situation all across the country. Furthermore it is why there really hasn't been anything done to fix the problem. Basically nobody wants to spend the money, or if they do they want it spent in such a way the majority sees it as enabling people's bad behavior.
Meanwhile the crazies,
Re: (Score:1)
The old-school Left blamed Kennedy. David Horowitz organized one of the first (or the first) anti-Vietnam marches. I think they marched from College Park, MD to DC. Of course, many of them skipped from Kennedy to Johnson then were happy to settle on Nixon. Apparently their children in the media only heard the Nixon part.
As the hard-core geeks here all know, Collage Park later became the home of MAE-East. MAE
Re: (Score:2)
Kennedy did get the US involved in the first place, but by the time he died we still didn't have that many people over there and they were mostly acting as advisors. Johnson and Nixon both e
Homeless vs. Street People (Score:2)