Some decades ago, the nation closed many of its insane asylums or residential hospitals for the mentally ill. My memory says it could have been during the troubled 1960s, but I'm prepared to have the date be off by a decade in either direction.
This came about as the radical left and radical right found something upon which they could, for different reasons, agree. The left believed that people had a total right to be insane, without the society's intolerant interference. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest was their anthem. The right wanted to cut government spending, and eliminating expensive custodial institutions for the insane looked like a big budget reduction.
At approximately the same time, our pharmaceutical researchers found several classes of drugs that, if taken continuously with great precision and careful monitoring, could often produce a near semblance of sanity in the otherwise incurably insane . Legislators closed mental hospitals with great gusto, all the while bragging that so-called outpatient community facilities would monitor these individuals' behavior and prescribe the correct drugs.
We all know what happened. The outpatient community facilities are routinely underfunded. Many of the insane either do not get prescription drugs they need or do not take the drugs they are given. Self-medicating with alcohol or street drugs is very common. The insane often end up as the talking-to-themselves homeless living rough under bridges and pushing stolen shopping carts with their worldly possessions. Others patronize the rescue missions and soup kitchens. Some live in their cars. Some become homicidal college students in Virginia (or elsewhere).
I propose the revival of an old solution - the open-ended institutionalization of the incurably mentally ill. Warehousing these individuals is the only currently practical way of protecting us from them, and protecting them from themselves.
