A recent news article detailed the massive number of psychiatrically ill inmates in state prisons with some dying from suicide or inadequate medical care though still awaiting trial. But this sorry state of affairs should have been expected since, over past decades, state psychiatric hospitals were largely closed and the promised outpatient clinics and community care/supportive housing facilities for the mentally ill went left unfunded with savings going into government coffers. Other critical factors were "civil-rights" lawyers and courts deciding that it was better to die "in freedom," psychotic or drug addled on the street, rather than be forcibly hospitalized; and most psychiatrists becoming mere pill pushers rather than the psychotherapists they had been in previous decades
Loading…}