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by BeetleB
3565 days ago
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Edit: Deleted my earlier comment, as I misread yours. Regarding what you said: The GP is not disputing the need for mental health institutions. He is pointing out that the ones that existed were horrible, to the point that closing them down was better than running them. At the moment, too much of mental health is being handled by prisons. Whenever I read from people who study the problem, they all agree that: 1. It shouldn't be the prisons' responsibility. 2. The prisons are doing a better job than the mental institutions that were shut down. |
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If one were to read the history behind why the Reagan administration dismantled the mental health system, one would know that, in fact, what Reagan allowed to happen was a state sponsored ignorance of block grants that were initially allotted for the purpose of establishing local administration of mental health care. Reagan's mouthpieces said this was a wiser (letting states handle the money) way than Federal action to implement the plan Kennedy had initiated after witnessing his sister's incapacitation from her own 'treatment'.
The Reagan bunch then turned their heads and coughed while states deliberately ignored the intent of the money and spent it elsewhere, and did not, in fact, build mental institutions for short term treatment and release (with periodic checkups) that Kennedy's plan had described in exquisite detail.
To malign the intent and say that prisons are somehow better than the mental health treatment that was being administered is to suggest there was no alternative, which is implicit in your defense, though certainly not directly expressed. I seriously doubt you have spent any time in a correctional facility or mental hospital because you would then know that prisons are quite literally the worst place for a mentally ill person to be. Better they be homeless an under the care of the shelters and soup kitchens than locked in a concrete cell with hundreds, if not thousands, of undernourished, maltreated, and relatively unsupervised bangers.
There is the slimmest veneer of an attempt to rehabilitate addicts and/or treat mental illness within these facilities, but God knows there have been PLENTY of attempts for several decades to realign the institutions such that they are congruent with our understanding of what constitutes psychological healing.
It truly WAS Reagan's administration that put the decision to opt-out of locally 'sourced' mental health treatment in ultra conservative governor's and their respective cabinet advisors' hands.
Let us not obfuscate what the worst ever was with what may have been were cooler heads to have prevailed.