AIBU to feel upset by my parents' views on mental illness

And he wasn't hurt and he didn't press charges and yet still you would lock her in an asylum.

Stop saying she swung it at the man. The man was sat a bus stop at the bus station. She came over to him while he was sat down and hit him with her bag. Her "swing" connected and it hit him mainly on the arm and shoulder but a bit on his head.

Agree with other posts. They are probably referring to some very specific incidents involving individuals.
Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on your POV), we dont just lock people up because they are mentally unwell or "weird" on the off chance they might commit a crime. In the recent high profile cases there were failings by those who were in a position to do something but even then what grounds were there for locking them up? Where would they go in anycase? Do we want to go back to a time when it was easy to get your, usually wife, sectioned because she was suffering with depression etc...or where electric shock therapy was dished out like sweets?

Your use of “triggered” as a response to hearing an opinion you don’t happen to agree with is an example of where things have gone wrong. People are self identifying with mental health conditions to sound special while other people with serious diagnosed mental illness are allowed to walk the streets murdering innocent passers-by.

They wouldn't lock up a man for swinging a shopping bag at a person who won't press charges. If you had your way we would have asylums full of people who are no real danger to anyone.

You sound like you have a huge chip on your shoulder about the fact that most physical violence is committed by men.

We know most of the time things go awfully wrong, the person was assessed to be that kind of risk by at least some professionals involved in their care.

Agree. If all it takes is a spiral or something to snap and endanger so many lives at a whim then yes they should be kept under strict supervision.

i was 3 streets away with my kids when this happened. We heard and saw the police and ambulance, helicopter and all the commotion. Knowing how close this was to your kids, is terrifying. And I completely understand your parents pov

Patients will bad mental health whilst on medication with help and support can live quiet normally within communities !
Patients like most are not supported because mental health care in down the pan !! And this is not the patients fault they can't help being ill they just don't have a safety net there which should be !!!

Whereas I live in London so I see violent and/or severely mentally ill women all the time.

And how would you decide someone is not fit to be living in society, lock them up just in case?
How would they even be assessed if they were like so many ‘flying under the radar’ of all services.
The media like to report the person was known to MH or Prevent or suchlike but dont report this could have been months or years before an event.
Risk assessments are dynamic, only what is captured at that point in time

It’s funny isn’t it how where you come from or your background shapes one’s reaction to a news story. When I heard it , my initial reaction was a group of homeless people/people on drugs having a row between themselves over some perceived slight as that’s something I’ve witnessed loads of times. I am very rarely exposed to a man pretending to be a woman (although very much aware of it and the eroding of women’s rights) so it’s not my first thought. Perhaps it should be I don’t know but there was something in the report about it being a contained incident so I assumed not someone on a rampage .

as an aside I’ve just seen some footage and it does look like a woman. Way she goes down she doesn’t seem to have a man’s strength.

There are also people who have periods of being very unwell but also long periods of stability back in the 90s the mental health trust i worked for had far more acute beds , a rehab ward ,a day hospital
But from the late 90s these were all gradually closed down

Haven’t the last 5/6 terror incidents been classified as a “mental health episode”?

yeah it’s really suspicious because she had short hair rather than flowing hair extensions and must have forgotten to wear her stilettos and dress that day. Ergo she must be a man.

Anyone with eyes can clearly see it’s a woman. But gotta get that anti trans stuff in there.

Yes, for physically attacking a stranger with shopping bags. They could have tins, glass, anything. But generally speaking, if you arw so mentally ill that you hit strangers, then you probably need to be locked away. Even if you have a vagina

You want her locked up for swinging a handbag at a man who does not want to press charges?

There are layers of complexity and clearly a spectrum of severity. There are many thousands of people who function very well with medication. They absolutely should not be ‘locked up’. But when things go wrong there must be more support available for crisis management and inpatient capacity. There is a whole other question re how you manage homeless people with severe mental illness

I listed 4 incidents of people where there would, in 3 cases, be multiple people alive today who are dead and many injured who wouldn't have been, some of them with life changing injuries, if those 4 people with mental health issues had been locked up. One of those should certainly have been sectioned but wasn't, as confirmed by an enquiry.

We aren't stupid, we all know it isn't all people with mental health problems and we all know that mental health issues are caused by all sorts of things.

I think she needs to be held under strict supervision in an institution. She's physically attacking people in the street just for being there!.

It is not those who are ill who are to blame for their illness, but care for those suffering from poor mental health is now SO bad that mistakes are being made. You only have to read these boards for a few weeks to hear from women whose husbands are psychotic and behaving very erratically (and often life-damagingly) and who are being fobbed off.

We need more money poured into mental health services. Much much more.

You wrote 'they have a point'...

which means you support the OP's parent views that people with mental health issues should be 'locked up''.

I consider that to be a totally inappropriate blanket statement.

It is not 'attacking you' either to point out on a discussion forum that holding the blanket view that people with mental health issues should be 'locked up' is simplistic and offensive because it fails to take into account the fact that we have poor mental health support provision and that people would not reach crisis point if they were properly diagnosed, medicated, supported and if so many of them did not end up living in the streets.

A lot of people are clueless about things like this and they like to look for broad stereotypes and automatically apply them to everybody. They clearly mean those who have severe MH issues which take over their minds and make them behave dangerously - and I do agree that these people should not be left to roam free in the community - but they're too dim to be able to differentiate.

Racists do the same thing, when they talk broadly about "these people coming over here", when referring to those who commit horrendous crimes; but when you ask them about all the non-UK-born doctors and nurses without whom the NHS couldn't function, and those who run businesses in the community, and virtually every single immigrant... and they'll look at you as though you are the stupid one, as "Of course I don't mean THOSE immigrants!"

So many people are completely uneducated when it comes to MH. How many people do you hear saying "I/he/she has mental health" as a shorthand for mental illness? Nobody would ever say "I have legs" to indicate that they have broken or otherwise injured legs.

Care in the community is missing

mothers are picking up the burden of caring for younger people with no support and no advice

i dont think we - anyone - actually knows how to help some people

I can quite see why “locking up” is back on the agenda given the chronic failures of the current system. I can quite believe that residential care done well may be the best for lots of people but it’s very expensive especially to do with care and intent to help people

no one wants to pay. This is a horrible situation for so many

I don't think that you have to blame the people with mental illnesses themselves to think that this approach isn't working. I agree that it's those people who are more vulnerable to harm. The members of the public that they encounter won't all just be nice people that don't know what to do.

There is absolutely a need for a modern day equivalent of what used to be called an asylum. Care in the community does not work and time and time again mentally ill people are committing horrific crimes.

What exactly the place would be like I have no idea. But we are in desperate need of somewhere to house people who are not safe to be out in society.