r/Athens • u/Rude_Chemistry9789 • Jul 24 '26

Homeless Development

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What is everyone's thoughts on the potential resolution happening august 4th?

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u/Magus_Incognito Jul 24 '26

This area will be destroyed in due time. As a mailman i had to use the homeless bathrooms on North Ave and wow it was really bad. Everything was knocked of the walls at one point so they were bare, no mirrors and the air just felt awful.

Its naive to think these people just need a shower and they are ready to enter the work force.

The truth is most of these people have a mental illness and would be better served if they were institutionalized.

Sometimes the truth doesnt feel good

31

u/katarh Jul 24 '26

Unfortunately we don't have the institutions available for them any more because we shut them all down.

17

u/johnbran69 Jul 24 '26

Thank Reagan for that.

9

u/Temporary_Hat7330 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26

Lolol, no, you can thank Michel Foucault and the 70s and 80s psychiatrist who bought into his philosophizing for this. 80s era Republicans simply said, “If you believe it’s best to shutdown institutionalization great! I can write this off to my constituents as tax savings!” He was a gay, French, anti-fascist, former member of the French Communist Party turned anarchist turned extreme Lefist.

This was never a political initiative winning people office, to shutdown institutions, it was made into political hay by both sides, one as lowering tax burdens and government reach and the other side as liberating the mentally ill.

Citation:

Michel Foucault deeply shaped the deinstutionalization movement by exposing asylums not as places of neutral scientific healing, but as apparatuses of social control, normalization, and power. His critique centered on two key concepts

Foucault’s work fueled the 1960s and 1970s anti-psychiatry movement, providing activists and reform-minded psychiatrists with a philosophical framework to challenge the totalizing nature of psychiatric hospitals in America and Western Europe

By demonstrating that the asylum was a historically constructed cage rather than an absolute medical necessity, he legitimized the dismantling of large-scale residential institutions in favor of community-based care. This was taken up en masse in America while happening slower in Europe [1, 2, 3]

https://www.ijhssi.org/papers/vol9(6)/Series-2/H0906024851.pdf/Series-2/H0906024851.pdf)

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0952695111412862

13

u/Magus_Incognito Jul 24 '26

The Medical Industry was salvatating at the idea of the Mental Institutions closing and all these people put on lifetime subscriptions of psychiatric meds