President Donald Trump has said he would be open to bringing back "insane asylums" to imprison people with "serious mental illness".
In an interview with the Daily Caller published on Monday, the president said that forcing more people into long-term psychiatric institutions would help make America's streets safer, although he admitted it would be "massively expensive".
"Well, they used to have them, and you never saw people like we had," Trump said. "They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it. You know, it’s massively expensive...
"But we had, they were all over New York. I remember when I was growing up... they released them into society, and that’s what you have. It’s a rough, it’s a rough situation."
He added: "You can’t have these people walking around... so dangerous, so dangerous. And they can live to be 85 years old."
Neither Trump nor the Daily Caller made clear exactly what they meant by "insane asylums". But the term is usually applied to an older kind of psychiatric institution in which those deemed mentally ill could be involuntarily confined for months or years, often in brutal conditions and with little medical effect.
Repeated abuse scandals, court judgements, and new mental health medications — as well as the system's vast expense — led to a wave of reforms that made it much more legally difficult to detain a sick person for long periods of time, ultimately cutting the population of such facilities by over 90 percent.
But some doctors and politicians have also criticized the new status quo, arguing that it has left large numbers of vulnerable people with mental illnesses living rough on the streets or cycling in and out of jails, general hospitals, and short-term psychiatric facilities.
Trump has long expressed support for bringing back asylums. On the campaign trail, he reportedly promised: "When I am back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever, and authority to get the homeless off our streets...
"And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions, where they belong... with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage."
In his interview with the Daily Caller, Trump falsely claimed that Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital in New York City had been “closed by a certain governor”; in fact, it still exists.
He also mentioned NYC’s Bellevue Hospital, which has closed its old psychiatric hospital but still takes mental health inpatients.
He went on to give a confusing and difficult-to-follow answer about "crazy" women "screaming" and "spitting" in men's faces, while the men feel unable to do anything about it.
"These guys are just — they wouldn’t — but they can’t do it. Now they can do it. So I said, 'they spit, we hit'. Right?"
Trump also insisted that it was "the right thing to do" to allow Chinese students to study in the U.S., because to ban them would be "very insulting" to China and would "hurt the system" by depriving American institutions of revenue.
It came after far-right influencer Laura Loomer demanded the president immediately expel the U.S.’s roughly 600,000 Chinese students, wrongly claiming that all of them were “Communist spies”.
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