How Would Trump React To An Hour Of Loud Cramps Music?
The 1978 Cramps/Mutants concert I helped stage at the Napa state mental hospital has taken on a legendary status in the punk rock community. At the time, Napa State was winding down its operations and the patients were “reintegrating” into the community. As we drove away after the show, we saw one running down the road in her pajamas and helped her escape. She became a force in the San Francisco and then NYC punk communities.
Two decades earlier, though, a movement known as "deinstitutionalization" was gaining momentum in California and across the country, advocating for shifting the care of people with mental illness from large, overcrowded, understaffed, state-run hospitals to community-based care settings. When Reagan became governor of California he embraced that “reform” and he implemented severe budget cuts to the state's Department of Mental Hygiene, leading to a reduction in the number of beds available in state hospitals. In 1967, he signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, establishing new “protections for the rights of mental health patients,” including the right to refuse involuntary commitment unless they met specific criteria. Between 1967 and 1973, the number of patients dropped from over 35,000 to around 7,000.
There wasn’t nearly enough adequate community-based care resources for those leaving state hospitals and the draconian budget cuts implemented during Reagan's administration and continued in following years are seen as limiting the availability of necessary support services for vulnerable individuals with mental health issues leading to a severe increase in homelessness and mental health crises across the state.
Clarice Schillinger, a Bucks County Moms Against Liberty type, ran for Pennsylvania Lt Governor in 2022. She came in 4th in the GOP primary but remained an outspoken voice in the conservative “parental rights” school movement. She was just charged with punching a teenager while hosting an underage drinking party at her Bucks County home for her daughter’s friends and is up on criminal charges of assault, harassment and furnishing minors with alcohol during her daughter’s birthday party. Is she mentally ill— or just another typical MAGA Republican? Or are all MAGA Republicans mentally ill? Her issue? She’s an untreated anti-vax psychopath.
Court documents “state that during the event— which started Sept. 29 and went past midnight— Schillinger’s then-boyfriend allegedly grabbed a 16-year-old by the neck for intervening in a fight between the couple and hit a 15-year-old in the face during an argument over football. According to the allegations in court papers, her intoxicated mother also punched the older teen in the eye and chased him around the kitchen island. Police said they had cellphone recordings of some of these reported events. To escape the unruly adults, several minors started making their way out of the home, even as Schillinger ordered them to stay, court documents allege. Cellphone footage showed that as the teens gathered in the foyer Schillinger lunged toward one partygoer before others began restraining her. That individual told police Schillinger struck him three times with a closed fist but that he wasn’t injured, according to the affidavit.”
Schillinger, photographed (above) with another dangerous sociopath, had been serving the teens Amsterdam vodka and Malibu Bay Breeze rum, pouring liquor for them and playing beer pong with them. Again— mentally ill, typical Republican or, more likely, both?
On Monday, Carmen Paun reported that “The linked crises of drug addiction and homelessness have Washington on the verge of embracing a health care provider it once repudiated: the mental hospital. Nearly 60 years after Congress barred Medicaid from treating people in what were then derided as insane asylums, lawmakers are on the verge of reversing course. The reasons: Community-based care championed since the 1960s hasn’t stopped record overdoses— and constituents have had it with the brazen drug use and tent encampments in their cities. Some public health advocates agree that times have changed and the magnitude of the crises justifies lifting the rule. ‘It is no longer the 1960s, and there is no longer the same stigma against the treatment of mental health,’ said GOP Rep. Michael Burgess, a doctor representing Dallas’ affluent northern suburbs who sponsored a House bill to change the rule.”
Does this mean there is help on the horizon for people like Clarice Schillinger and other deranged MAGAts? Can someone make a case that Donald Trump, for example, is not seriously in need of psychiatric intervention? How much of a danger in Trump's mental state to society? Instead of prison, should be be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a mental institution?
Public health groups including the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Alliance on Mental Illness, as well as state Medicaid directors, support the change.
They say the 1965 rule barring Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor and lower-middle income, from funding hospital treatment has had unintended consequences: a lack of psychiatric beds for people who need them. Instead, they said, many vulnerable people end up on the streets, in emergency rooms, in jails or dead.
They say the policy also perpetuates discrimination against people who suffer from drug addiction and mental illness compared to those with physical conditions, for which there’s no such exclusion.
…California found that its waiver to provide medication-assisted treatment for people with substance use disorder in mental hospitals helped individuals “who need a relatively intensive level of care for short-term stabilization of acute needs,” said Ann Carroll, the California Department of Health Care Services’ spokesperson.
Even so, the system as it stands is failing to provide state-of-the-art care to many patients. One-third of the 1.5 million Medicaid enrollees with opioid use disorder, for example, did not receive medication treatment in 2021, according to the HHS inspector general.
The 2018 SUPPORT Act, a landmark law meant to provide prevention, treatment and recovery for people with opioid addiction, gave states a new, albeit temporary, choice to provide care in psychiatric hospitals for up to a month without having to obtain a waiver.
That option, which only South Dakota and Tennessee have taken, expired in September. The SUPPORT Act reauthorization bill the House passed in mid-December would reup the option and make it permanent.
…A repeal of the funding ban wouldn’t mean a return to the 1965 mental health care model “because that is just not where the system is today, that’s not where the clinical understanding is today and that’s not where any of the conversation is today,” said Jack Rollins, the director of federal policy at the National Association of Medicaid Directors.
…California Gov. Gavin Newsom has included ways to compel people into care in his mental health system overhaul. In March, Californians will decide on a $6.4 billion bond proposal Newsom has pitched to build nearly 25,000 psychiatric and addiction beds.
…Homelessness rose by 12 percent between 2022 and 2023 nationwide as rents surged and pandemic-era aid ended. More than 650,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
California is home to the most unhoused people of any state— some 181,000 people— followed by New York, with some 103,000.
Politicians fear open-air drug markets and tent encampments in their cities could hurt them at election time.
And they’re increasingly confident that caring for more of those suffering on the streets in mental hospitals won’t become a similar political liability.
Last week, Talia Lakritz told a story that disturbs many California voters wary of Newsom— his decade long relationship with Kimberly Guilfoyle, currently living with Donald Trump. Jr and far crazier than Clarice Schillinger. Newsom and Guilfoyle met in 1994, married 7 years later and stayed together for 5 years. She moved to New York while they were married. Their on-again-off-again marriage was dissolved, amicably, in 2006. She got knocked up by some businessman in 2006 and married him before popping out a son that year. They divorced in 2009, after Newsom found someone else to marry, after a scandal that almost wrecked his career (an affair with his best friend’s wife), cementing his reputation among many Californians as an untrustworthy scumbag.
By the time Guifoyle started screwing Trump Jr, she was a severe coke addict and already a victim of the plastic surgery that had made her look like a bride of Frankenstein. Trump Jr is also severely addicted to coke. Neither of them has been treated and— like Clarice Schillinger— there is no indication that either will ever see the inside of a mental institution. Newsom’s excuse for being married to someone like her is that she wasn’t always a nutcase and that she “fell prey to the culture at Fox in a deep way.”
On an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show later that week, Guilfoyle called Newsom's comments "absurd," adding that she was a registered Republican while they were married and that it was Newsom who had changed drastically.
"I didn't change, he did," she said. "He used to be so proud to fight for small business, for entrepreneurs, for those hardworking men and women. And he's fallen prey to the left, the radical left, that is pushing him so far to the left that it's unrecognizable."
Guilfoyle also said that she thought Newsom would run for president in 2024 and that it's something he "wants very badly."
I love this post of yours, all of them really, but this one is hilariously insightful.
It is common knowledge that Newsom hasn't really been sober. He went to Mimi Silbert at Delancy Street to sober up. He stayed sober for a short period of time and started to drink again. He has been a closet drinker. He is not an forthright fellow.
I applaud the attempt (?) to 'splain only one of reagan's evil accomplishments that measurably aided in making america a shithole. It's never, as far as I know, been thoroughly fleshed out.
It's unfortunate for CA that he started his reign of evil there. It should have been enough to permanently bury his political career... in any other country. But in america, unleashing indigent insane hordes on the public (to save tax money that helped create billionaires out of millionaires), is a badge of honor. So he, of course, was made president just as he was becoming a non-functioning intellectual defective himself.
The problem WAS that care afforded to the indigent insane was substandard and, too often, just plain cruel.…