It’s way past time to end the left’s
‘perversion of compassion’ and get
help for the seriously mentally ill

They had help at one time, they were called asylums. The only danger was to the people who worked there and the patients to each other. Having them out in society where they can rape, kill and harass people is not a solution.

No political will and no asylums, true enough. There is a larger cultural issue. The left has neutered and ridiculed our religious institutions, which has led to a spiritual decay in our culture. Knowledge of right and wrong has been weakened almost disappearing from culture and our politics flows from that void. The author nails it: The politicians and their progressive supporters believe they are being “compassionate.” What they have produced is a culture of decay and death.

Totally intentional to seed chaos.

Many state and federal laws (not just NY) call for community based treatment and discourage hospitalization at all costs. Advocate for the mentally ill call for choice, even when the person is incapable of making a choice. The entire system is a train wreck that has led to the mess we have today. If someone is involuntary kept in an institution, their rights are being violated and the law is being broken. What is really being broken, other than laws, is a safe society.

B,B,But if these folks get help they might vote Republican! We can't have that!

"Perversion of compassion" is a powerful use of the English language. It's a wonderful weapon in our war with those who work to bend reality.

The Left has completely abandoned logic and operates on pure emotion. They think indulging, facilitating and / or ignoring self-destructive behavior is “compassion” when, in reality, it's the worst thing you can do to a person in distress.

There truly needs to be an option for street people to get help. I know many don't want it, but there has got to be a better way. I get the potential for abuse by staff in the asylum setting, but we need something short of just locking them in a room.

You can thank mr Clinton and his pals at the ACLU for closing hospitals and institutions that helped the mentally ill. They decided that people being held in institutions were being deprived of their civil rights. So they released the sick people and closed hospitals .

This horror started with faked or exaggerated “documentaries” by Geraldo Rivera in the late 70s/early 80s. He pushed BS about asylums while carrying bogus stories from Big Pharma’s new “miracle drugs” that let crazies out and “be cured” and saved from horrendous asylums — all it took were super expensive prescriptions that evil insurance companies wouldn’t cover due to mental health exclusions. Public outrage followed and a leftist SCoTUS followed predictably, forcing the crazies out among us. Like everything in Getaldo’s evil career, this was a lie, and caused disaster when implemented.

Here's the problem with this article. Most of these people are so seriously messed up that they cannot ever be "OK". The REAL goal should be to protect society from people who have been shown to be dangerous. Admittedly, that's a fine line to determine. If it were up to dems, all Trump supporters would be committed. And I would certainly wonder if some on the Left that had assaulted people and burned cars should be committed. But that's the challenge we face and the realization that some people are forever broken and the rest of us shouldn't be threatened by them. WE have rights too.

It's funny how everything people warned what would happen back in the early 70's if all the insane asylums were closed and all those people were let out. The mentally ill would be walking and sleeping in the streets causing trouble and clogging the medical system because they would end up in the emergency rooms. They were right. Same thing with letting lawyers advertise on tv back in the 70's. They warned that the court system would be clogged with frivolous lawsuits, prices would increase on everything, and over regulation would occur. The leftist media cried it was all hysteria by the right. Now, here we are fifty years later, and who was had it right all along?

At Christmas Eve mass we had a nutcase walk into Church during the Gospel. He walked in, came half way down the aisle and glared at the priest. He had a onion in his hand ,which I believe he intended to throw at the priest. He stood there for a couple of minutes dropped the onion and walked out, followed by a couple of attendees, and out to his vehicle where he threw a tangerine at one of the Church attendees he got in his car and drove away after some verbal not too nice conversation with attendees. Does it sound crazy? It was., but there are these people out there., and some of them are armed with more dangerous weapons than onions and tangerines.

When I was a kid going to church a car door opened and a passenger fell out landing on his head and shoulder. It was our friend Jerome. He laid there laughing with legs in the car and his head and shoulder just laying there. Dad said this isn't going to end well. A binder snapped in his head. He went from being the smartest, nicest kid in the whole world to the verbal sector of his brain jacked like someone put his brain in a soup can and stirred it with a spoon. They thought it was a concoction of LSD and too much booze but no one really knew. His mother would get him into the state hospital but he'd walk off heading for home. He'd stop on the way by and sit down at the table and mom would add a plate for lunch and we'd sit with him like nothing was wrong. Mom would ask when he ate last. He'd think for awhile and say breakfast yesterday before I left. We'd look at each other and wonder what he drank. If it was really dry out how'd he find a mud puddle? One day in town I stopped the car and said hello to Jerome. He asked if I'd take him home. I said I didn't know about that since his mom had a court order to stay away. I took him home. His mother walked out and said I'd have to take him back to town. She said it over the shouting in the house between Jerome and his little sister. We drove through the trailer parks, stopping here and there trying to find someone to let him sleep on their couch. I finally stopped at the old hotel being referbished. We found the manager. He asked Jerome if he had any money. He said he knew the deal: $20 the first night then work for a bed. Then, he winked at me and I gave him $20. Jerome would get jobs at factories and we'd see him sleeping in the roadside ditch in front of his job. He drank ditch water and obviously ate something. Eventually, 20 years later, his mother got him committed. He lives in a halfway house at the hospital. We kept tabs on him by asking another friend who was the recreational director at the hospital. She got to sit in a circle with criminally insane inmates trying to make them play nice using board games. One of them chopped his mother's head off and hid it in the dishwasher. Those stories are for another day.

Does the phrase...."tough love" mean anything these days...there was a time when WE understood that some people can not be in society...they are twisted people...for whatever reason...only God knows...it means to me...that sometimes the love must be tough...and WE the people must step up and say...you are in trouble ...mentally...and need an asylum to protect yourself...as well..as US...it will not be easy because there are those among US who spout the line...WE are cruel...actually ...WE are kind...and realistic...

The sad thing about helping people who don't want help is that they reject the help. You can't FORCE people to do what they don't want to do. All you really can do is keep everyone else safe from their destructive behavior!

For a couple of decades we had the "homeless" who were mostly mentally ill and quite a few were drug addicts. They allowed them to pitch tents anywhere, use the streets as their bathrooms and even supplied them with drugs ostensibly so they would not rob people to support their habits. That wasn't enough for the Leftists who decided that letting in millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom were worse than our own homeless would be a good idea. Leftists are mentally ill and the main reason that the asylums closed was that people could not pay for their treatment and psychiatrists could not charge them over $100 per hour so they dumped them on the streets. If medical insurance covered the mentally ill, the industry would be booming. That is not a recommendation.

The "compassionate" people felt that mental institutions were terrible places and it would be more compassionate to let the patients live in squalor on the streets. The "compassionate" people that push this (starting mostly in the 1950's in California) should be put into mental institutions because they are obviously crazy.

Yes, the testing of open air insane asylums.....letting the violently mentally ill run free....has failed. We need to go back to putting some mentally ill people into institutions where they are locked in, and cannot get out to harm normal people. We USED TO understand that this was a necessity. But "compassionate" leftists pushed this knowledge away, denied the reality. Time to go back to what we knew was true long ago. Some people are too crazy and dangerous to let loose.

"Help" is fine, although I am skeptical that the seriously mentally ill can ever become actually sane and normal, regardless of psychologists' claims. But more important to me than "help" is keeping the violent crazies off of the streets and locked away where they won't be harming innocent people. THAT's the name of this project.....keep the normal people safe from the violent crazies.

Starting with Joe Biden, perhaps?

More than 40% of the prison population is mentally ill. I wonder if it is cheaper to keep most of these in a lower-security "hospital" type of facillity.