On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au>wrote:
>
> And so you had a situation that was untenable. So that whole thing was
> brewing.
> But there was also a political element. And the history of LPS is really
> interesting, so LPS refers to Lanterman Petris Short, that's the name of
> the
> three California legislators who drafted civil commitment law that was
> passed in
> 1967, implemented in 1969.And LPS law basically what we refer to mostly as
> 51-50
> law, and if you've heard the term 51-50, that stands for the California
> Welfare
> and Institutions legal code 51-50, and basically that's the legal code that
> has
> jurisdiction over whether someone can be held against their will in a
> psychiatric setting for an evaluation for up to 72 hours, and the three
> criteria
> are: danger to self, which basically means being suicidal; danger to
> others,
> which means being potentially violent or homicidal; and gravely disabled.
> And
> gravely disabled means being unable to care for your basic needs: food,
> clothing
> and shelter, on the basis of a severe psychiatric illness.
> So these were the three criteria. Forty-three years later these are still
> the
> same three criteria, and there were other things that happened around late
> '60s,
> early 1970s.
> Another thing that happened then was Frank Lanterman, who drafted the law,
> was a
> conservative legislator from Pasadena, and he had ties to John Birch
> Society,
> Daughters of the American Revolution, very, very conservative
> organisations. And
> he said and those around him said that psychiatric hospitals were Marxist
> tools,
> that basically that the people in hospitals were political prisoners and so
> there was under a cry of libertarianism, and what I would call political
> cover
> of libertarianism said, 'Let these poor people go.' So. But really what the
> fiscal - the fiscal side was driving it as well, that essentially that
> there is
> a lot of money to be saved by closing the state hospitals. 1960 there's
> half a
> million people in state hospitals in the United States, 1980 there's
> 100,000. So
> basically this was under the cover of libertarianism, there was a fiscal
> drive
> to actually empty out the state hospitals as well.
> So you have really an arch-conservative/libertarian from Southern
> California.
> His co-author, Nicholas Petris from Oakland, describing the literature as
> 'ultra
> liberal', and he was more of the school of thought that grew up under The
> Myth
> of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz, RD Laing The Divided Self, that there is
> a
> whole groundswell on the left saying that mental illness was a myth and
> that
> these are just kind of misunderstood, eccentric, poor characters and we
> should
> just let them go. And so you had far right, far left, and then Short was
> just
> sort of thrown in at the end, I can't tell you much about him except his
> first
> name was Alan. So Lanterman, Petris, Short, they had this sort of unholy,
> political alliance, and so this law was crafted.
>
>
> full:
> http://au.mg6.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?.gx=1&.rand=5enkfrqc7l37u***********************************************************************
>
> "With the seizing of the means of production by society production of
> commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the
> product
> over the producer." Engels
> http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
>
>
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