I don't think you read my response very carefully. First of all, I was responding to Poli's claim (only) that therapy was the appropriate treatment for him.
Nope. I read your response very carefully, so perhaps instead you were being reckless with words. Let's review the words you posted and that I already included in my response.
This is you:
thebeave said:
"here" is in reference to this thread. "Nobody" means there does not exist a person. In conjunction they begin a mathematical construction:
There does not exist a person in this thread such that...
This then includes everyone in the thread, including me....a person whom you just claimed you were not talking about.
To continue with the quote that I already posted in response:
thebeave said:
...has ... expertise on his current mental state ...
See this is the section I was responding to.
You have stated in effect
There does not exist a person in this thread such that they have expertise on his current mental state.
We have a good amount of knowledge on his mental state and this is sufficient, not full-on psychiatric degrees and "expertise." I have already documented the wealth of knowledge we have. Because there is a sufficient amount of data out there, we need not be psychiatrists. It all follows from logic and evidence. So, people who did read carefully articles about the topic and make inferences came to the correct conclusion that he is a chronically mentally ill person who at times is a danger to society.
Now your particular beef with Politesse might or might not be a thing, but included within your beef, you included everyone else in the thread and made a statement contrary to evidence. This is because there DO exist persons in the thread who have a sufficient level of knowledge of his mental state to comment on what disposition of his person would best serve public interest.
Why you jumped in and claimed I was "assuming" things about your responses is a little odd, TBH. How/why did you think I was talking about you?
This has already been explained as you wrote about everyone in the thread and you were quoted doing so. Perhaps I could be clearer next time as to why I am responding or perhaps next time you could be more careful when you begin statements like "Nobody here." Either way my response is relevant to the thread topic.
I don't think any of this conversation is necessary since it is a board with multiple people and it is expected that people jump in all the time when two posters are writing to each other. For example, Politesse responded to Ziprhead and you jumped in to that.
Now that this is out of the way, let's look at portions of your post related to disposition of Reed:
First of all, I was responding to Poli's claim (only) that therapy was the appropriate treatment for him. There are multiple ways of treating mental health issues depending on the diagnosis and analysis of the patient's past history, by a mental health specialist (which he is not). It could very well be that he is schizophrenic, for which medication is often the best and only treatment needed. Or medication and therapy both. Or shock treatments. ...
*FULL STOP* I think perhaps you have the wrong impression either of Politesse as a person or of the post made. Did you think that Politesse imagined Reed going to a psychotherapist appointment one hour a week to lay on a couch and talk about his mother to an older gentleman in his study wearing a Noam Chomsky sweater and smoking a pipe? That sarcasm isn't meant to be berating, it's meant to illustrate a point to you in interpretation. Politesse wasn't discussing narrowly psychotherapy appointments to the exclusion of anything else. Most of the alternatives you listed in your paragraph ARE therapy. Therapy is "treatment intended to relieve or heal a disorder." The "medication" you refer to as "best and only treatment needed" for schizophrenia would be part of a therapy program. Even "shock treatments" that you mention are therapy--also called electroshock therapy, by the way. Finally, even if we were discussing therapy as an intervention, if everything is working properly and done properly, such narrowly defined psychotherapy is a doorway to broader treatments (also therapy).
So, I was not dismissing that he was mentally ill.
That's fair, but it isn't as nuanced as what you or I was writing. You had written that nobody here had expertise on his "current mental state." I've discussed at length above on why expertise is not necessary and that the knowledge available is sufficient already. But here, let's focus on the word "current." That is, on the preponderance of evidence his current mental state is dangerous to the public and exhibiting mental illness. All of the recent arrests we are aware of show irrational behavior--the kind consistent with mental illness or __mania__ and inconsistent with a sane individual. The frequency of his arrests are absurd and show not merely a consistent pattern, but a __continuous__ pattern: 72 arrests since 18 at 50 years old means ~2.2 arrests* per year. This isn't a situation where we can say yesterday he was mentally ill but today he is fine, but rather there has been a continuous problem since adulthood, possibly even since childhood....we cannot say because that isn't reportable.
My picture of the jail cell was posted because had he been detained behind bars until his trial after his last assault, like prosecutors had strongly recommended, that poor girl would not have been horribly burned. Or do you think he should have gone back to the psych hospital for safe keeping until trial? Is that fair to the staff and social workers there? I still think a jail cell would have been the best holding place for him and the general public, given the alternatives.
There's a lot there. Let's go through this slowly. First, what historically does our legal system do with the insane? How does one work with the other? One purpose of the criminal justice system is accountability and another is deterrent and yet another is rehabilitation. The problem with applying these concepts to the insane is that they might not be able to understand the consequences to their own actions or to stop themselves without intervention or mental health treatment (therapy). Making one accountable makes sense for someone who appreciates the consequences of their actions. Deterring them from future misbehaviors makes sense if they are capable of controlling themselves. Rehabilitation might make sense if prison systems worked that way. (I know you wrote jail but I am talking in general about the system first).
"...psych hospital..." Note that he had previously been in a psych ward at a hospital. This is a different kind of entity from a state-run mental health facility. The former is for acute, short-term care. The latter is for long-term care of chronic conditions. In an ideal world, I think that these kinds of institutions need more funding and in such a world, Reed ought to have been placed in such system __earlier__ by virtue of all the evidence of his chronic issues. The man is now 50 years old. How much more severe is his condition now than it would have been earlier and how much easier would it have been to intervene earlier in his life?
Is that fair to the staff and social workers there?
Note that you could ask the same question on the same grounds about every single mentally ill person in either a psych ward of a hospital or in a long-term mental health facility. Is it fair to social workers and mental health professionals that they sometimes may be physically hurt at work and have very difficult jobs? You could even ask the same question about a guard in a prison who is murdered in trying to argue for the death penalty of _all_ violent offenders in prisons. We simply have systems in place where there is some kind of optimization of public freedom and public security where we err on the side of freedom and life and there are tough jobs in support of those optimizations. These jobs carry risk but they are also voluntary.
Regarding a long-term mental health facility versus a jail proposition specifically for violent mentally ill persons, I see no reason why a mental health facility cannot have restraints and medications as appropriate for the offenders in question who may improve their condition with treatment. I am unaware of any such mental health facility that does __not__ have restraints or even padded rooms on a needed basis.
Let's be clear about something here:
I still think a jail cell would have been the best holding place for him and the general public, given the alternatives.
...the above is a retrospective analysis or as the colloquial saying goes, "hindsight is 20/20." That is what the whole thread is about, hypothetical past scenarios that would deal with the problem differently to produce better outcomes. It begins with the thread "progressive judges..." In other words, it's saying that if only there had been a conservative judge, then this tragedy would not have occurred. The thread op author then went on to say to bring in the National Guard. I am arguing that we have a system of laws and institutions that is in place to deal with the mentally ill (though it has been underfunded and many other things not dealt with adequately). That further if we want to deal in hypotheticals we could also discuss that.
Now, we could also hypothesize that law enforcement (typically MAGAs) probation officers could also have been doing a better job monitoring Reed. This is because he had been out during the time of his latest offense __during curfew__. We cannot blame the judge for believing that persons would do their jobs and that systems being advocated (monitoring programs) work as advertised.
In analysis, one factor here is then the monitoring of Reed. It is more proximal than the judge. And the under-funding and lack of utilizing a long-term mental health facility is more toward a root cause than a proximal cause. The judge's decision to believe in monitoring program and limited risk of that course is arbitrarily in-between these two other causes.
Of course, it isn't really arbitrary. It is part of a pattern to upend institutions in the country. The trolling pwn the libs commentary of sending in the National Guard is a clue as well. BUT, even ignoring all that drama, there's still work to do here, is there not?
More than 30% of seriously mentally ill people in the country do not receive mental health treatment. We see in thread after thread in this forum, MAGAs make excuses for someone with a gun murdering someone: "Oh well, they were mentally ill. We do not need gun control." Okay, fine. Then, what is being done to make society safer and _better_ considering all these mentally ill people? Cutting funding by DOGE but that was par for the course over a lot of time of removing funding. And what have Republicans done about healthcare costs which feed into pushing patients out of those psych wards faster?
In reality, when we look objectively at causes of events there are many. The causes we choose to focus upon and the solutions we therefore then advocate for say a lot about us as individuals.
