A History of Mental Illness

The Australian Broadcasting Company has a relatively good retrospective on changing attitudes toward, and treatments for, mental illness. The most telling quote is about the changes in the 1960s:

Deinstitutionalisation became the catchcry and across the world there were campaigns to replace asylums with smaller day hospitals and halfway houses which would allow patients to work, live normal lives and be better integrated into society.

What really happened between 1960 and 1980 was that the asylums dumped their inmates onto the streets of cities. Today in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain many of the severely mentally ill end up in prison.

And many more sleep in doorways or cardboard boxes and defecate in alleys, coarsening the public arena. The destruction of mental hospitals, spurred on by Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was one of our least admirable acts.

Deinstitutionalization sprang from an unholy alliance between two groups. Liberals who believed blithe non-conformity was what mental hospitals suppressed and conservatives who saw a way to cut large chunks of government spending. When next you see a hollow-eyed wreck pushing a stolen shopping cart filled with grimy possessions, remember why the mentally ill are left to their own pathetic devices.