Mental health and San Francisco

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
At the weekend, someone was explaining to me that the reason there are so many people with mental health issues in San Francisco is that the authorities in another state (New York) once gave all those coming out of its mental institutions free tickets to SF. Can there possibly be a truthful story in here?
 

swears

preppy-kei
A friend who travelled across the states a couple of years back said that there were loads of seemingly homeless people suffering from mental illness there. Ranging from out-and-out screaming maniacs to oddball eccentrics peddling weird conspiracy theory leaflets and the like. He said he thought it was something to do with the very high cost of living there, the aftermath of hippy-era drug use and terrible public services.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
He said he thought it was something to do with the very high cost of living there, the aftermath of hippy-era drug use and terrible public services.

Having visited the place in August and caught a cold, I would add "the appalling climate" to that list.
 
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sufi

lala
not heard of that one but i know that castro emptied his mental institutions in the 80's when the US (briefly) liberalised political asylum
fidel-castro-sm.jpg

HST here -> http://badcrazy.com/
 

arcaNa

Snakes + Ladders
For the homeless people, I do know that some sort of law forbids them to sleep on the street, saw a shocking documentary where police patrols routinely harassed and chased away homeless people from the sidewalk where they tried to get some rest at night... Horrible :(

Even a mentally strong person, given such harsh conditions, would eventually collapse, I guess.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
i think it's a combination of left-over hippie psychosis and loads of crazies moving there. if i was homeless i would live in Venice beach in LA, but if i was a few important keys short of a piano i would maybe find more friends in SF. the worst is Berkley... played a gig there once and the streets at 4 AM is like Night of the Living Dead...
 

bruno

est malade
could it be something more prosaic like being in the proximity of a fault? because we live on seismic ground as well and mental health issues here are rampant. i would imagine living on shaky ground unhinges people a bit (this is pure speculation).
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Hmm, that sounds a bit feng shui-esque to me. Sure, being involved in a huge earthquake where buildings collapse and people die must be pretty traumatising, but wasn't the most recent quake of that size in SF about a hundred years ago? And I can't really see otherwise sane people being sent mad by the occasional tremor.
 

bruno

est malade
ok then, what about electromagnetic activity? i remember reading that it fluctuates with seismic activity, is it too far fetched to think it could affect people in some meaningful way (a la tms)? i'm showing my complete scientific ignorance here, please forgive me!

i feel tremors all the time, incidentally. but you are right that full scale earthquakes are few and far between.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, I've heard of this - there's even a hypothesis that seismically-generated EM fields could cause glowing plasmas in the air that would be visible at night, appearing as the so-called 'Earthquake light' phenomenon or even as UFOs, which are according to some researchers are much more common around fault lines:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_light

BUT I have no idea how strong these fields are, and I would be surprised if they're not totally swamped by the EM fields any city-dweller is constantly exposed to from artificial sources (power lines, trains - or trams in SF, electrical systems in cars, etc.).
 

zhao

there are no accidents
i think it entirely possible. i've also heard, not from reliable source at all mind you, that in places with significantly more wind mental illness rates are higher.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
That sounds perfectly plausible, especially for light sleepers who might be kept awake at night by the noise.
 

bruno

est malade
incidentally, has anyone here undergone (or knows someone who has undergone) tms therapy?
 

bruno

est malade
transcranial magnetic stimulation :) it's used to treat depression and so on (fairly effectively, it seems)
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Cool.
But even so, I expect it works by sticking some kind of machine right on your head, so as to deliver a fairly powerful magnetic field, right? I'm not saying there's definitely nothing in the faultline-EM field idea about SF's nutter abundance (it's certainly not my field of expertise), just that I doubt the fields are strong enough to have much of an effect.
 

bruno

est malade
yes, that makes sense. i'm halfway into this piece and it seems to cover most of the subjects in this thread (in an entertaining way, at least, i can't vouch for the science).
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, I've heard of that idea before, it's pretty cool. Alternating EM fields can also induce feelings of terror and dread, and have been implicated in certain 'haunted' houses. Very interesting stuff.

The description of the headgear in that piece reminds me of this:
ghostbust71.jpeg
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
these are all interesting theories, but the reason why all those people in SF are crazy is because most of them spent the better part of two decades shooting speed
 
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