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.

The deinstitutionalization craze that has gripped America since the 1970s

Benjamin Weiser writes in the New York Times about a homeless woman who recently died. Co-blogger at Ace of Spades CBD writes,

In Sunday’s NYT there is a long article about a homeless woman who lived on a grate near Grand Central Terminal. She was seemingly intelligent, a Williams grad, and had a promising future snuffed out by mental illness.

What struck me was that some of those who had contact with her spoke of her death’s emotional effect on themselves, rather than an analysis of the issues and a suggestion of their own culpability.

That might be the crowning achievement of the progressive march through our institutions; that every event is viewed through an internal prism that bends the events back towards us. What they have taught for two generations is solipsism (thank you Jay Guevara for the perfect word) rather than the ability to observe the world around us.

Barack Obama was perhaps their greatest achievement; his obsessive fixation on "self" was evident in every speech, every public appearance.

I am not suggesting that anyone involved in this sad tale is directly responsible for this poor woman's death. But an honest appraisal of the issues instead of emoting about how awful one feels about her difficulties and her death is probably a more constructive way to deal with it.

What is ironic is that the majority (probably all) of the people involved and interviewed probably support the deinstitutionalization craze that has gripped America since the 1970s. I wonder whether a firm public policy of forced commitment would have helped this woman. My suspicion is that it would have. That is not to say that our institutions were wonderful, but an all-or-nothing approach makes no sense. We have moved the mentally ill out of sometimes awful psychiatric facilities into the revolving door of the street, prison and an early death.