DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION
Between 1955 and 1994, roughly 487,000 mentally ill patients were discharged from state hospitals. That lowered the number of institutionalized Americans to 72,000 patients.
Most states closed the majority of their mental hospitals. That permanently reduced the availability of long-term, in-patient care facilities. By 2010, there were just 43,000 psychiatric beds available in the country. This equates to appx 14 beds per 100,000 people. According to the Treatment Advocacy’s Center’s report, “Deinstitutionalization: A Failed History,” this was the same ratio as in 1850.
As a result, 2.2 million of the severely mentally ill do not receive any psychiatric treatment at all.
About 200,000 of those who suffer from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are homeless. That's one-third of the total homeless population.
Ten percent are veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or other war-related injuries.
More than 300,000 are in jails and prisons. Sixteen percent of all inmates are severely mentally ill. There were about 100,000 psychiatric beds in both public and private hospitals. There are more than three times as many seriously mentally ill people in jails and prisons than in hospitals.
Three major societal and scientific changes occurred that caused deinstitutionalization to take hold.
First, the development of psychiatric drugs treated many of the symptoms of mental illness. These included chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and later clozapine.
Second, society accepted that the mentally ill needed to be treated instead of locked away. This change of heart began in the 1960s.
Third, federal funding to both Medicaid and Medicare went toward community mental health centers instead of mental hospitals.
Who's to blame?
There's a whole host of people we could blame. You could blame Thomas Szasz and his "The Myth of Mental Illness." You could blame Ken Keysey and his anti institutionalization epic, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," but mostly it was US! Public opinion, born of good intentions is what pushed our mass deinstitutionalization.
It DID NOT start in the 1980s. It began in the early 1960s, gained momentum through the 1970s...its IMPACT was first felt in the 1980s.
This dishonest, disreputable national media of ours would like you to believe that, "We too, are confused. We just saw the effects and assumed it began in the 1980s under Reagan."
No...that's utter nonsense. It takes anyone less than 8 minutes to look all this up.
Sorry, this national media despised Reagan...and blamed him. Nothing "mistaken" about that. They don't make "mistakes,." They aren't merely "partisan." They are a propaganda dispersal unit, geared to misrepresenting reality in virtually every way.
It's a tragedy when you can't trust a single thing your own national media says...but that's the case in America today.
Beyond that, the failure of deinstitutionalization is a failure of good intentions and as such, is a cautionary tale.
Today, we're seeing the same thing with the push by a number of naive, misguided people blaming a nonexistent "Capitalism," for all the economic ills of the industrialized world.
America was the last Western nation to abandon Free Market Capitalism, which it did on December 23rd, 1913 with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which forged a partnership between the U.S. government and 12 private, independent and international member banks.
What we have is a market-based Corporatism, the same as France, Germany, England and the Scandinavian countries. The differences between such countries are few. They all have generous welfare states, they all have varying degrees of public health programs, they all have relatively high tax rates for working/middle class people.
Socialism's Command Economy has NEVER worked anywhere in the world. It failed in the former USSR and Russia's economy has rebounded with a market-based system, including a 13% flat tax.
The Command Economy failed in Mao's China, which has also flourishes under a market-based system today.
It is STILL failing in Cuba, Haiti, Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
ALL of these Marxist/Collectivist experiments were forged in good intentions. Naive, impractical, unworkable good intentions...much like DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION. (https://mentalillnesspolicy.org/…/deinstitutionalizati…/amp/)
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