The Anthony Cumia Show - July 28, 2025


Letting Nutcases Roam Was a Bad Idea ｜ 07-27-25

Topics
deinstitutionalization
Hosted by
Anthony Cumia
Mentioned
George Costanza Jack Nicholson Geraldo Rivera Willowbrook Seinfeld Trump
It Takes a Village to Ignore the Parents ｜ 07-20-25 You Can Get Arrested for Telling the Truth in Europe ｜ 07-27-25

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

135.54

Word count

1,508

Sentence count

70

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of the WBC Minicast, host John Rocha talks about the need for more mental institutions in the United States, and why they should be used in place of the usual jails, prisons, and mental hospitals.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:01:00.080 Listen, all you New Yorkers.
00:01:02.380 You mean taxi?
00:01:04.000 Okay, then you want to look around?
00:01:05.300 This is the 77 WABC Minicast.
00:01:10.460 The mental institutions. These things are so needed in this country right now.
00:01:18.440 uh sure we have our run-of-the-mill criminals your people that just want to uh steal do harm
00:01:28.540 to people uh they're not technically mental um but they're violent and and you know you want
00:01:38.400 to avoid them at all costs and that's who the police uh that's what the police are for
00:01:45.180 That's who they arrest and hopefully put in jail to keep them away from the civil society that we profess to live in.
00:01:57.380 But then there's the mental patients.
00:02:01.480 And like I was saying, I'm not I'm not a hard guy.
00:02:07.020 I'm not a mean, uncaring person.
00:02:10.180 i understand mental illness is an illness in many cases the person can't help themselves they have
00:02:20.160 some kind of a mental thing and drug abuse goes hand in hand with that a lot of people have
00:02:26.040 mental illness because of so much drug abuse over the course of the years uh and it's all
00:02:33.200 fine and well to want to help i want to help these people we can't just lock them away
00:02:41.040 well yeah i think we can i i think we can and i think trump has uh made made a step toward that
00:02:52.600 with his executive order from this past thursday to start committing involuntarily committing
00:03:02.660 people to uh mental hospitals i know there's there's a lot of controversy here which
00:03:10.500 i really don't see how controversial it is to want to keep dangerous people away from society
00:03:18.940 and perhaps put them somewhere where they're not a harm to other people and themselves
00:03:25.560 and uh you got doctors that can treat them and look i i can guarantee it's not a uh it's not
00:03:35.220 like going to camp i don't think any of these mental institutions are like going to camp
00:03:40.320 where it's all fun and games go watch one flew over the cuckoo's nest right until they lobotomize
00:03:47.640 uh jack nicholson it looks like a pisser just looks like a lot of fun your mental
00:03:55.400 you get to wear your pajamas all day and your slippers and you shuffle around you got a kind 0.92
00:04:02.560 of a bitchy nurse telling you what to do but you know nicholson takes you out fishing you 1.00
00:04:10.100 can watch the ball game or not depending on what the mean old nurse ratchet has in store for you
00:04:16.240 but uh a lot of movies about mental institutions unless they're documentaries i don't know it's
00:04:24.160 Like George Costanza said in in one of the Seinfeld episodes where his girlfriend was committed or signed into a mental institution.
00:04:32.860 She's like, yeah, I envy them because, you know, they get pity.
00:04:37.040 Pity is good.
00:04:38.420 You get to wear your pajamas.
00:04:40.160 So George Costanza understood the upside of a mental institution.
00:04:47.440 But look, I understand the difference between TV shows and reality.
00:04:52.000 I don't think these places are what they call a hoot.
00:04:57.280 Geraldo, Geraldo Rivera, many, many years ago when he was making his bones in this business, he went and exposed Willowbrook, Willowbrook Psychiatric Hospital.
00:05:11.280 And, oh, boy, did that just blow the lid off of what was going on in a lot of these mental institutions, at least in the New York tri-state area.
00:05:23.380 It was abominable.
00:05:25.340 Oh, my God.
00:05:27.680 Just the abuse.
00:05:29.020 People sitting in their own fecal matter, and half of them didn't have clothes on.
00:05:35.000 They're performing all types of activities and actions that you probably shouldn't do in public.
00:05:44.940 And it blew the lid off.
00:05:46.560 It was a huge news story.
00:05:48.140 And people demanded reform in mental institutions, which I guess they should have.
00:05:54.120 It's not like a thing where you just go, oh, well, that's what's happening.
00:05:57.780 Cool.
00:05:59.060 You know, a lot of people said something has to be done.
00:06:02.920 We can't just warehouse these people in these big buildings.
00:06:09.360 Well, I think I think the solution was, well, if we can't fix it and we can't get money to fix it or we don't have the capability, we don't even know how to help these people.
00:06:25.320 It was the 70s, for God's sake.
00:06:28.340 They didn't even have as many of the psycho drugs and everything back then.
00:06:32.920 they just decided well we'll we'll let them go we'll free them like born free just open the doors
00:06:40.720 and and let them go so it uh they closed down a lot of these places and between even the 60s
00:06:51.780 even before the great geraldo uh had that expose they were already starting to shut down a lot of
00:06:59.540 these institutions because people kind of got wind of what was going on in
00:07:03.380 there and said, yeah, we got to, we, we can't be treating people like this.
00:07:08.380 So they let them out.
00:07:09.640 They actually put them in places that were more local.
00:07:15.320 Like you wouldn't just ship your mental patients from, you know,
00:07:19.460 talking about Long Island, let's say you wouldn't just ship them from Suffolk
00:07:25.520 County up, up to a mental hospital anymore.
00:07:29.540 miles away you'd keep them close so they'd open up these little uh inpatient outpatient mental
00:07:38.340 facilities in neighborhoods sometimes they were a house in a neighborhood and um it was called
00:07:44.920 deinstitutionalization but it's a mouthful deinstitutionalization and this was to help
00:07:56.120 well it probably sounded like a good idea at the time most things do most things presented to the
00:08:04.860 american people are presented in a way that's going to be awesome they don't normally just
00:08:09.300 come up and go hey people uh boy strap in this is gonna suck it's always like we got something 0.96
00:08:17.360 we're working on it's gonna be great the mental patients we're letting them out how is that great 0.84
00:08:24.120 Well, we're going to put them in your neighborhood in these little like halfway houses and facilities where we call it mainstreaming them. 0.96
00:08:34.860 And that way they get to go to the corner store or talk to people on the street or cave their head in with a cinder block. 0.99
00:08:44.100 We don't know actually what they'll do.
00:08:47.620 And maybe initially there was a lot more effort being made to to help these people.
00:08:54.300 And it wasn't as much keep them away from society because they're a danger.
00:09:00.500 It was, hey, we got to help these people out and just shoving them in a giant gothic looking building with gargoyles on the side and barred windows hasn't been doing it.
00:09:10.900 so uh that's what it's been for many many many years now well of late uh it seems to have turned
00:09:22.720 to the point where there are very violent mental patients running around the streets
00:09:28.740 and they are doing unbelievable harm and damage to society and to people you know you want to
00:09:36.700 You want to go to work.
00:09:37.660 You have to, especially in these big cities, you have to take public transportation.
00:09:42.120 You have to walk around on the streets at all times of day and night.
00:09:48.040 And what we've seen are that these mental patients do some harm.
00:09:55.460 You let them all out.
00:09:58.260 The care went downhill over the course of the years.
00:10:02.580 And no one seems to want to address the problem.
00:10:07.300 So Trump recently, Thursday, I know he's been talking about it a while, but Thursday signed that EO to start committing these people.
00:10:17.960 The police could walk up and if they're committing a crime, arrest them.
00:10:21.480 They're not going to be in the precinct for 20 minutes, never mind actually being taken to a facility like the Tombs in New York or Rikers Island or something.
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