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| A neat and tidy tent city in Olympia, Washington, USA |
I remember, back in the sixties, back in Oz, reading, hearing, of one real guy who was really with it, man... Timothy Leary, and his call to "turn on, tune in and drop out". Part of that, I seem to recall, was that mental health, craziness, was just a social construct, in that, like, who says you're crazy, man? the whole world is crazy, man. It's all on a line, we're all the same, just some of us see the world this way and some that way... and...
.... well, you get the picture. It was certainly the zeitgeist of the times. Don't lock people up, just cause you think they're crazy. Let em out, man!... [ADDED: the article linked below mentions the French post-modern philosopher, Foucalt, but not, strangely, Timothy Leary, who, in the US at least, was far more influential, even as he drew on Foucalt]
And now we have the results. Well, not just "now", it's been this way for years, and getting worse. And all the result of well-meaning Democrat policies.
What Christopher Rufo doesn't highlight in his deep dive into homelessness in Olympia, Washington, is this: 50 years ago there were 6,767 hospital beds per inhabitant of the state. Today there are 380. Imagine: For every 18 hospital beds back in Leary's day today there is only ONE. The rest, the people not occupying those beds, are not cured; they are not in our families; they are not integrated in our society. They are in tents, as above; or in emergency rooms; or in jail. These are the new "invisible asylums".
This is a massive case of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". A massive case of "unintended consequences". That would be one thing if those who pushed these failed policies now admitted they were failed. But they don't. That's the tragedy today. No fault; no cure.
The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar. In a long arc—from President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963 to the present—federal and state governments dismantled mental asylums and released the psychiatrically disturbed into the world. Though there were sometimes brutal abuses in the state mental hospitals of the early twentieth century, the closure of the asylums did not put an end to mental illness. If anything, with the proliferation on the streets of psychosis-inducing drugs such as methamphetamine, the United States has more cases of serious mental illness than ever before—and less capacity to treat and manage them.
The question now is not, “What happened to the asylums?” but “What replaced them?” Following the mass closure of state hospitals and the establishment of a legal regime that dramatically restricted involuntary commitments, we have created an “invisible asylum” composed of three primary institutions: the street, the jail, and the emergency room. In slaying the old monster of the state asylums, we created a new monster in its shadow: one that maintains the appearance of freedom but condemns a large population of the mentally ill to a life of misery. [Read on...]
