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We used to fairly easily commit people to asylums. There was lots of abuse of this power. Mental institutions were very bad places (see One Flew Over the Cuckoo

We used to fairly easily commit people to asylums. There was lots of abuse of this power. Mental institutions were very bad places (see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Finally the pendulum started swinging the other direction starting in about the 50s (in the 60s JFK called for reform) and culminating in the 80s when Reagan effectively emptied the mental institutions (but more for budgetary reasons than any concern for the mentally ill). And now we've reached the other extreme where we're too afraid to violate the civil rights of the mentally ill so we let them stay on the streets because that's what they "want" to do.

cwmoore 4y ago
I think too many basically sane people are close enough to losing their minds at all times that they would fear for their own civil rights. The mentally ill on the streets are only a small sample of a spectrum. I understand the history well enough to note that a wide swath of (also) expensive alternatives have not been tried yet, or the basically sane people mentioned above would be willing to undergo treatment that works.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> culminating in the 80s when Reagan effectively emptied the mental institutions (but more for budgetary reasons than any concern for the mentally ill). “Reagan” getting credit or blame for this is largely misleading. There were a number of drivers.. Deinstitutionalizations was an important goal of the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. Subsequently, a series of federal court rulings in the 1970s which restricted involuntary commitment and required paying patients federal minimum wage for doing work in and for institutions (like the prisons, mental institutions were slave institutions – on top of their myriad other problems – in all but name) undercut both the pipeline and the financial underpinnings of the system of institutionalization.

cwmoore 4y ago

I think too many basically sane people are close enough to losing their minds at all times that they would fear for their own civil rights. The mentally ill on the streets are only a small sample of a spectrum. I understand the history well enough to note that a wide swath of (also) expensive alternatives have not been tried yet, or the basically sane people mentioned above would be willing to undergo treatment that works.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> culminating in the 80s when Reagan effectively emptied the mental institutions (but more for budgetary reasons than any concern for the mentally ill). “Reagan” getting credit or blame for this is largely misleading. There were a number of drivers.. Deinstitutionalizations was an important goal of the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. Subsequently, a series of federal court rulings in the 1970s which restricted involuntary commitment and required paying patients federal minimum wage for doing work in and for institutions (like the prisons, mental institutions were slave institutions – on top of their myriad other problems – in all but name) undercut both the pipeline and the financial underpinnings of the system of institutionalization.