Man detained in mental hospital after trying to set up Pakistan’s first gay club (www.telegraph.co.uk)
from jeffw@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 03:41
https://lemmy.world/post/16403691

#world

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MrFappy@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 04:11 next collapse

I’m not saying his overall intent was a bad one. But if you try something like that, in a country like Pakistan, you do kinda deserve to be in a mental hospital. I understand trying to spread acceptance and provide a safe place to go for those not accepted by the local society at large, but maybe there are better, even slightly more accepting places where this kind of idea would pan out. I feel like this is equivalent to opening a dispensary in Thailand.

catloaf@lemm.ee on 11 Jun 2024 04:26 next collapse

Honestly, better being committed to a hospital where he can’t be killed by a mob.

I’m all for fighting for human rights, but you have to fight. Just hoping for the best is never going to end well.

Xeroxchasechase@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 04:31 collapse

Opening the club was the fight. Because all the reason the commenter above you said.

dubyakay@lemmy.ca on 11 Jun 2024 04:50 next collapse

What’s wrong with a dispensary in Thailand?

Hellinabucket@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 04:59 collapse

Thailand and really most of Asia from my understand, has beyond zero tolerance for cannabis.

dubyakay@lemmy.ca on 11 Jun 2024 05:01 next collapse

Thailand decriminalized Cannabis use in 2022. They’ve tightened the rules here and there a bit, but it’s the Mecca of Cannabis in Asia basically.

xep@fedia.io on 11 Jun 2024 06:11 collapse

It will possibly be recriminalized by the end of the year.

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 16:05 collapse

Every Thai I know says that they don’t think it’s going to happen, it is leverage so the National Government can collect more taxes. “Ok we won’t ban you but you got to start paying more”

But hey that is just armchair speculation and this is a thread about Pakistan

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 12:27 collapse

Thailand has cannabis freaken everywhere a tourist might possibly be. I don’t know it if is possible to walk in a straight line for ten minutes in Pattya, Chaing Mai, or Bangkok without seeing cannabis for sale. And that is just official places, the stuff really grows like a wild weed there so tiny stores random stores will have the tea version for sale.

seSvxR3ull7LHaEZFIjM@feddit.de on 11 Jun 2024 06:55 next collapse

He maybe should’ve known that it wouldn’t work, but does he ‘deserve’ to be in a mental hospital? Absolutely not.

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 12:30 next collapse

Lemmy: protest groups have every right to block ambulances in the English-speaking world. If people die they die.

Also Lemmy: we have to respect the homophobia of Islam because Christopher Hitchens supported the Iraq War 21 years ago.

Wahots@pawb.social on 11 Jun 2024 15:45 collapse

The first queer people here got fired from their jobs and left largely destitute. They were the ones that started the first gay societies and the first protests in front of the White House. Throughout the decades, many were fired, arrested, or died from poor health or deaths of despair.

Someone always has to take the first step.

I recommend reading The lavender scare, it’s extremely relevant right now, and I had to keep checking the copyright date because the same shit is happening the same way it happened in the 50s.

Xeroxchasechase@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 04:32 next collapse

I’m not gay, but I truely Admire him

jeffw@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 05:06 collapse

You’re allowed to admire gay people without saying “I’m not gay” lol

Xeroxchasechase@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 06:03 next collapse

Oh thank you so much!

Agent641@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 06:17 collapse

Im not gay, but you’re welcome.

Psych@lemmy.sdf.org on 11 Jun 2024 07:52 collapse

I’m not gay but thank you for welcoming the other not gay dude .

Plopp@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 08:39 collapse

I’m also not gay.

iAvicenna@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 08:48 next collapse

which brings me to the next agenda item, opening a “not gay club” in Pakistan.

Blackmist@feddit.uk on 12 Jun 2024 13:39 collapse

Well anyone not joining is going to be in big trouble.

FlyingSquid@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 10:13 next collapse

I’m not gay, but I do wish I was more fabulous.

Agent641@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 10:29 collapse

Oh honey, you’re exactly the right amount of fabulous!

FlyingSquid@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 10:31 collapse

You haven’t seen me with glitter in my hair. Everyone is disappointed.

iAvicenna@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 11:24 collapse

do you have hair to put glitter on? if yes don’t complain…

FlyingSquid@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 11:26 collapse

You can most certainly put glitter on a bald pate. It sticks more easily. And what is the point of non-fabulous hair?

I’m just saying I could learn a lesson or two from people behind the scenes at a drag show.

Resol@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 13:27 collapse

Neither am I.

neidu2@feddit.nl on 11 Jun 2024 11:37 next collapse

I’m not gay, but you’re right.

Tja@programming.dev on 11 Jun 2024 17:57 collapse

I’m not gay, but well said.

FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today on 11 Jun 2024 04:43 next collapse

TBH the information I gleamed from this is that Pakistan somehow has mental hospitals when much of the USA lacks that sort of amenity.

jeffw@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 05:05 next collapse

Deinstitutionalization is a good thing. The US lacks community treatment. We don’t need to go back to locking people up

FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today on 11 Jun 2024 05:30 next collapse

Okay but a pipeline of funding care seems a lot better than criminalizing homeless people who exist as a result of deinstitutionalization.

jeffw@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 06:14 collapse

Right. Thank you for repeating what I just said in simpler terms ig

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 16:02 collapse

Anything to avoid talking about the elephant in the room, and what the hadiths and Koran say to do to homosexuals.

No, instead we dance around it by talking about safe subjects like what Reagan did in the US.

Yes please let’s talk about what a shitty US president did 44 years ago that impacted the US population instead of talking about what an Islamic military dictatorship did to a gay guy this week.

Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 05:41 next collapse

The US went from over-treatment to no treatment. Neither has a net positive outcome.

jeffw@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 06:08 next collapse

Deinstitutionalization has nothing to do with the lack of funding for mental health programs today. Two separate issues.

Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 12:31 collapse

Actually, funding has a very large part to do with moving away from institutions. You’ll find money is behind most big decisions in this country. Not that I’m defending the hell that is institutions

jeffw@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 14:38 next collapse

That’s true. My point is that closing institutions and funding the alternatives are separate mechanisms. It should have been done all at once but Reagan didn’t see it that way

Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 15:31 collapse

That’s fair

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 16:03 collapse

Actually this article is about Pakistan

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 12:31 collapse

I am pretty sure there are social workers in the US.

Warl0k3@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 06:00 collapse

What?? We desperately need mental health institutions back. No, we don’t need the romanticized victorian dungeons, but what we do need is an alternative to jails. Secure treatment facilities. We have… four, on the west coast. Two of which have at most ~160 beds. The priority waiting list for admission is decades long (no, that isnt an exaggeration) and there isn’t a non-priority waiting list. If you’re not a priority, you just go to jail!

Community treatment is critical and we totally lack anything like it, but good god deinstitutionalization was one of the biggest public health and social equity diasters this country has ever had.

jeffw@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 06:02 collapse

It was a failure because it was co-opted by the right (Reagan) and manipulated into a way to cut public health expenditures.

The original idea, from the left and advocated for by people like JFK, was much different

Warl0k3@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 07:27 collapse

Deinstitutionalization was dreampt up by deluded idealists that slept with a copy of Naissance de la Clinique firmly lodged in their asses. Abolishing asylums was good, because at the time asylums were the aforesaid victorian dungeons. But from the outset, the movement was based on the belief that a magic pill would cure everything and all long term treatment was oppressive.

Antipsychotics enabled community treatment at all. But the wholesale rejection of both long term and secure treatment facilities was an indefensible failure of reasoning and an abject tragedy, and one that was set in motion by Hoffman and his peers when they penned the foundational texts of the movement.

We desperately need secure treatment facilities. There is no solution if we do not have them, just the continuing abject failure of basic human decency that we currently have. This system is broken, and it is directly the fault of everyone who began the deinstitutionalization movement and their total inability to foresee the obvious consequences of their actions. Regan was evil and JFK was understandably bitter, and even though they both worked to bring the end of asylums, they are both still guilty for their roles in bringing this current hell down on us.

Mrs_deWinter@feddit.de on 11 Jun 2024 06:13 next collapse

If you live in the US and experience a psychotic episode, a suicidal crisis, or another mental health emergency - where do you go?

FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today on 11 Jun 2024 06:29 next collapse

You hope that being talked at over the phone is enough to save your life, lol. Other than the suicide hotline or a regular doctor’s appointment, you’ve got no options. Dial 988 for mental health crisis.

Mrs_deWinter@feddit.de on 11 Jun 2024 07:59 next collapse

Bleak.

I don’t quite understand how deinstitutionalizing was supposed to work here. That’s like dissolving the fire department because we want to avoid cars. Was there no way to reform or replace the institutions? Just getting rid of an emergency service seems kinda like the situation you’re describing was part of the plan.

FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today on 11 Jun 2024 17:13 collapse

The institutions were reformed. By conservatives. The Reagan Administrations “reformed” them into something that the federal government doesn’t pay for, while also cutting taxes.

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 12:24 collapse

Crisis services

tobogganablaze@lemmus.org on 11 Jun 2024 06:32 next collapse

Don’t need to go anywhere. The police will come and shoot you.

Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 2024 08:11 collapse

Americans are so lazy, everything has to be a delivery service.

activ8r@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 2024 11:25 collapse

Fucking hell, this was cold and I am a terrible person for laughing at it.

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 12:41 collapse

Real answer? Social Services is probably the number to call unless there is a emergency medical issue in which case just regular 9-1-1.

Likely you will either ride in an ambulance or with two social workers in a car to the hospital. 24-48 hours out-patient while you are stabilized. If it is a temporary situation, say you had an insanely high fever and were delirious you would just go home. If it wasn’t temporary highly likely assigned a case manager for placement.

Despite what you see in the movies/TV you will not be thrown into an mental institution you will not be forced to take a cocktail of drugs that make you a zombie.

Mrs_deWinter@feddit.de on 11 Jun 2024 13:27 collapse

My experience does not come from movies. I am an outpatient psychotherapist (in a country with a reasonably functioning psychiatric system). I have repeatedly seen patients slip into psychomental crises where outpatient care is no longer sufficient. The local psychiatric clinics were sometimes real lifesavers. That’s why I find the idea of healthcare without emergency institutions confusing. I would find it terrible not to be able to offer my patients anything in such emergencies.

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 13:30 collapse

Ok well I am not sure what to say except my entire family is crazy so I have seen the procedure, also my wife is a hospital nurse. Pretty much every hospital has a floor for emergency mental health admissions.

Mrs_deWinter@feddit.de on 11 Jun 2024 13:35 collapse

Ah okay. So deinstitutionalization in that context was meant to include psychiatric institutions into general hospitals? Because that I can totally get behind.

Based on the other comments I got the impression that there simply is no inpatient treatment plan for mental health in the US.

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 15:55 collapse

There used to be huge asylums. Now there are almost none and the few that remain are nearly empty. The big thing is stabilize the patient and setup a plan so they don’t have to come back again. Which usually involves housing, assigned case manager, medication, food stamps etc.

Mrs_deWinter@feddit.de on 11 Jun 2024 16:22 collapse

That sounds really good. Glad to hear it.

catloaf@lemm.ee on 11 Jun 2024 11:14 collapse

I would not put too much faith in the quality of their care.

FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today on 11 Jun 2024 17:22 collapse

Still better than the Gulag, but yeah my heart goes out to gay club man.

Kolanaki@yiffit.net on 11 Jun 2024 05:09 next collapse

I mean… You gotta be crazy to try and open a gay night club in a place that criminalizes being gay and not expect to be detained or even killed. I get it’s likely a form of protest, I’m just not sure what their desired outcome was.

Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 05:39 next collapse

They have more balls than me for trying.

Agent641@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 06:17 next collapse

For his next act, a swingers club in Saudi Arabia

random_character_a@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 10:41 next collapse

Global news coverage and maybe some light martyrdom on the side?

jaybone@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 13:30 collapse

But don’t they have dances where they have sex with young boys?

mlg@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 06:45 next collapse

His mistake was not having a contact within the army leadership.

faintwhenfree@lemmus.org on 11 Jun 2024 08:16 collapse

It was “not a mistake” for army leadership to not having a contact with the dude.

andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works on 11 Jun 2024 10:37 next collapse

It sounds like a clever provocation, and he probably made sure it catches attention before they can silently move it under the carpet. He didn’t do any crime, he even proposed compromises to make it seem OK and followed official procedures, so they can’t (now, publicly) presecute him by law, but it offended their homophobia that much they found nothing more clever than dropping him into a mental yard instead of, like, declining his idea for some made up reason. What’s that if not a high-risk high-reward prank activism? At least, we now know that the state of Pakistan loses it’s shit over him touching that nerve.

Linkerbaan@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 11:35 next collapse

Glad we supported the Pakistani coup and decided to recognize the illegitimate and fraudulent Pakistani elections where they jailed Imran Khan.

And now we get bonus points for being able to whine about the right wingers we’re supporting!

awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 11 Jun 2024 11:43 collapse

As per Wikipedia:

The UN noted that there had been arrests of homosexuals within the past three years in 2018, 2019 and 2022.

So it’s not like LGBT issues were much better under Imran Khan either.

Linkerbaan@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 12:16 collapse

Pakistan now went more right instead of less right so I’d be surprised if it isn’t worse now.

awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 11 Jun 2024 13:10 next collapse

I wouldn’t be surprised either, but you made it sound like things are a lot more clear cut than they actually are.

Linkerbaan@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 14:54 next collapse

The new Pakistani government is pretty extreme right wing so it’s certainly not getting better.

intrepid@lemmy.ca on 12 Jun 2024 02:18 next collapse

The bad laws were in place even before Imran - so that isn’t unexpected. However, only a democratic government affords any chance of revisiting it. Arguing that the situation is the same now is completely disingenuous.

BilboBargains@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 04:57 collapse

It didn’t sound like that to me. Americans meddling in other countries is par for the course.

SkyezOpen@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 16:37 collapse

Holy shit they can tell the lesser of two evils after all.

Linkerbaan@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 19:00 collapse

The difference is that America isn’t going to go less right if Biden wins. It’s already in a downward spiral and voting Biden isn’t going to break it. If anything it will strengthen 2028 Republicans.

Pakistan wasn’t caught in the uniparty trap yet.

xc2215x@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 11:42 next collapse

Not sure why he thought that was a good idea. Being gay is fine but Pakistan not the best place.

afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 12:23 next collapse

I imagine to make a point.

yildolw@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 13:53 collapse
  • Man: Hi, I’m from Pakistan. May I move here?
  • Other country: No.
  • Man: I guess I’ll have to open a club in Pakistan.
lemmy_99c4zb3e3@reddthat.com on 11 Jun 2024 13:22 next collapse

He probably should open go-goat club.

spirinolas@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 13:26 next collapse

In their defense, you’d have to be insane to open a gay club in Pakistan.

zerog_bandit@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 04:47 collapse

Or any Muslim majority country.

“Religion of peace”.

I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 21:27 collapse

People are always surprised that I’m against Muslim immigrants. I don’t get it. I’m gay, seems pretty obvious to be against those who would rather I die. And I’m not against middle eastern immigrants. But Muslims? I have enough trouble with the Christians. Please keep your even more backward, fucked up religion in your shitty countries; which are only shitty because they are led by a backward, fucked up religion.

AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com on 11 Jun 2024 14:23 next collapse

He’s crazy for trying, yet also based as hell

MichaelTen@lemmy.world on 11 Jun 2024 16:54 next collapse

Read the book Psychiatric Slavery by psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Limitless Peace!

MehBlah@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 13:56 next collapse

Its a crazy thing to try in a mullahville. Those guys hate anyone who isn’t their particular flavor. Pretty much like baptist with more power.

nifty@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 21:38 next collapse

It’s kinda ridiculous, I hate that Islamic countries fail the separation of religion and state test. Education is a great way to change it, and just aiming to make people less religiously inclined.

CoCo_Goldstein@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 22:07 collapse

Islam was designed to be all encompassing. A separation of religion and state is anathema to Islam.

nifty@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 22:14 next collapse

Doesn’t matter, and same can be said of any religion. What matters is educating people and making them prefer secular states.

force@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 22:15 collapse

It worked for Turkey… until recently…

Leg@lemmy.world on 12 Jun 2024 23:04 collapse

I don’t think I know what progress looks like anymore.