I apologize if this goes down as thread hi-jacking, but if people want to know the viewpoint of the average redditor in 2024 regarding mental health, this is an absolutely dire snapshot of it. While scrolling the BBC site (I'm forced to pay tax for it so may as well use this) an article caught my eye, "Man found slumped dead at hospital coffee shop".
Turns out a man at a hospital in West Brom, UK died in the cafe, and wasn't noticed for several hours! Despite been slumped on a coffee table! In a hospital! Even a security guard noticed and ignored him for several hours. It seems he had some mental health appointment there, whether this is a case of ending it somehow, or just natural causes occurring, who knows. But what absolutely astounds me is the attitude towards it on an official NHS subreddit I found (r/nhs).
"Perhaps stating the obvious; but doctors and nurses aren't routinely checking on customers using private businesses located in a hospital. If anything this is a failing on the Cafe business itself (conviently not named by the BBC, but it was a Costa) and likely sod all to do with the trust who are merely Landlords in this scenario."
Is there any humane way you could be more dismissive? That is a man who has died on hospital grounds. Costa don't own that land, YOU DO, it is the NHS that leased them it. No one goes to hospitals as a recreational hobby, they go because they are ill. By this ideology, a man could be collapsed on a pavement in on adjacent street facing the hospital, and he'd be ignored as the hospital don't own said road.
And check out this comment here, with a whopping 16 downvotes in comparison to the 26 the above comment got.
"That's truly awful. There are a thousand places I'd see someone asleep and think "They're just having a snooze", but if I go to the coffee shop at work an someone's asleep on a table then I'm gonna check. It's a hospital ffs, the chances of it being a problem are WAY higher here Edit: downvoted heavily for this? Really? Anyone care to explain why you're downvoting if you disagree?".
No one has yet explained why it's downvoted. Probably because "I don't care about someone who's died" kind of makes you sound like an asshole doesn't it? Imagine getting 16 downvotes for caring about a dead person and politely asking for an explanation?
It's insane though. I mean think about it, how many nurses will have passed this man? It is NOT beyond the realms of possibility for a man to collapse in a hospital's vicinity! Imagine if in a school a teacher walked past a child slumped lifeless on a table, and the teacher remarked "well they're in Mrs. Stephenson's class and not mine, so it's not my problem!"
