Do Not, I repeat, Do Not bring up mental health. We had at Central Louisiana State Hospital, perhaps the finest Adolescent mental health facility in the nation, maybe the entire world. Time was 1985.. We also had, for better or worse, at least three operating full time, state funded mental health hospitals. I worked with those people at the Adolescent Unit. They had the funds which gave them the time, to help young people RESOLVE their mental health issues. Every young person I referred to that unit was released, sometimes after over a year of care, healthy, having all their issues resolved and became members of our society we were glad to have.
Then came our all knowing, all caring federal government. Oh, we need to keep those people at home where they will be happy. The local mental health clinics can take care of them. And if they can’t, private funded mental health hospitals can more than do the job.
Private facilities depended on private insurance. Private insurance said, will pay for two weeks and then they’re out of here. Give em a pack of meds and wish them (and us) luck. Two weeks for a severely disturbed young man or young woman and some meds used to treat psychosis (which they did not have) wasn’t worth a four day old shit. But that’s ok because we can fall back on the local mental health clinics right????? NOOOOO, the local mental health clinics flatly refused. They only work with people with diagnosed psychotic conditions, such as Bipolar disorder, psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia. Got any other problem, go see your med pro. (Who’s only option was to prescribe meds for, you guessed it, Bipolar, schizophrenia, major depression, which of course does not treat the issues that young people often have.
Where does this lead us to? School shootings, family breakups (what little family the federal welfare mandates have not already destroyed) and basically a royally fucked up society, with very disturbed people running amok.
mental health, fuck it, and fuck the idiots who mandated the destruction of a system that may not have been the best, but at least in some measure, it worked.
