Trump is right about opening up mental health institutions to treat severely mentally ill persons

Penny Starr writes in Breitbart,

The debate about America’s mentally ill and how best to help them — and protect the public if they pose a threat — goes back decades to the deinstitutionalization movement that started in the 1960s with the best of intentions but led to streets and prisons filled with victims of the failed idea.

...A more recent report on the website The Balance sheds more light on the journey from having places to care for the mentally ill to a nation that virtually ignores it, which can have unintended consequences:

Between 1955 and 1994, roughly 487,000 mentally ill patients were discharged from state hospitals. That lowered the number to only 72,000 patients. States closed most of their hospitals. That permanently reduced the availability of long-term, in-patient care facilities. By 2010, there were 43,000 psychiatric beds available. This equated to about 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.

“A lot of our conversation has to do with the fact that we have to open up institutions,” Trump said when discussing El Paso and Dayton. “We can’t let these people be on the streets.”

Read more of this excellent review of the history of deinstitutionalization here.