The State of U.S. Mental Health Intervention

Posted by Tina and

Consider the numbers of homeless and incarcerated mentally ill persons in America. Consider the panhandlers that disrupt business and pose health issues. Consider the poor lost souls wondering aimlessly without purpose or a safe harbor. Consider the many tragedies of school and church shootings, not to mention the many crimes, including murder, that might have been prevented…if only. The state of mental health intervention in our nation is dismal at best. What to do?

Walter E Williams addresses the cause of this dismal state of affairs and suggests a return to solutions and practices of a former era in his piece Another Liberal-Created Failure in the Daily Wire. Williams begins with a bit of history:

A liberal-created failure that goes entirely ignored is the left’s harmful agenda for society’s most vulnerable people — the mentally ill. Eastern State Hospital, built in 1773 in Williamsburg, Virginia, was the first public hospital in America for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Many more followed. Much of the motivation to build more mental institutions was to provide a remedy for the maltreatment of mentally ill people in our prisons. According to professor William Gronfein at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, by 1955 there were nearly 560,000 patients housed in state mental institutions across the nation. By 1977, the population of mental institutions had dropped to about 160,000 patients.

Starting in the 1970s, advocates for closing mental hospitals argued that because of the availability of new psychotropic drugs, people with mental illness could live among the rest of the population in an unrestrained natural setting. According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal article by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, titled “Fifty Years of Failing America’s Mentally Ill,” shutting down mental hospitals didn’t turn out the way advocates promised. Several studies summarized by the Treatment Advocacy Center show that untreated mentally ill are responsible for 10 percent of homicides (and a higher percentage of the mass killings). They are 20 percent of jail and prison inmates and more than 30 percent of the homeless.

Dr. Williams also answers a common current question that always follows mass shootings, “why isn’t something being done about the mental problems that seem to plague these shooters?”

Getting the federal government out of the mental health business may be easier said than done. A 1999 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Olmstead v. L.C. held that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, individuals with mental disabilities have the right to live in an integrated community setting rather than in institutions. The U.S. Department of Justice defined an integrated setting as one “that enables individuals with disabilities to interact with non-disabled persons to the fullest extent possible.”

There are many liberal ideas that have worked to take the civility out of our civilization and compromised the safety, health and well being of citizens, including the most vulnerable. These ideas are always introduced as well meaning and compassionate. The tactic to achieve political victory is usually the same. A grossly uninformed public is worked into a frenzy, protests are inspired and organized and demands are made. The idea rides into law on the backs of a fervent uninformed mob. An alternative is the court system.

Unfortunately the long term effects are never considered much less offered as a cautionary advisement.

Consider the many ways the left has operated through the years. They used the communist playbook to tear our free nation to ribbons and impose a socialist new order: Get rid of religion; take control of one of the political parties, the schools, entertainment, and the media; acquire significant control of the justice system; crash the economy; destroy the middle class.

Granting certain mentally ill patients their freedom is just another “good idea” in the mix that down the road has created a dismal, disruptive and often tragic result for the people.

When mass killings by mentally ill people occur we can count on the left to claim the problem with mental health isn’t that we tore down institutions but that the programs they suggested as an alternative were not properly funded. One of our own posters here at PS yammers on about this every single time the issue comes up. But Williams has done his homework here too:

“Altogether, the annual total public funds for the support and treatment of mentally ill individuals is now more than $140 billion. The equivalent expenditure in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy proposed the CMHC program was $1 billion, or about $10 billion in today’s dollars. Even allowing for the increase in U.S. population, what we are getting for this 14-fold increase in spending is a disgrace.”

The dollar cost of this liberal vision of deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people is a relatively small part of the burden placed on society. Many innocent people have been assaulted, robbed and murdered by mentally ill people. Businesspeople and their customers have had to cope with the nuisance created by the mentally ill. The police response to misbehavior and crime committed by the mentally ill is to arrest them. Thus, they are put in jeopardy of mistreatment by hardened criminals in the nation’s jails and prisons.

Chico streets have become “home” to some of the mentally ill people who belong in a mental institution for their own sake as well as for the safety and health of our citizens. But we are a small city with only a fraction of the burden. As we have learned in the last few years the problem has become a severe public health issue for California’s big cities. The typically liberal solution offered? Throw more money at it! Guess what the consequences of that will be? Higher taxes, less to invest in the private sector, job losses, greater homelessness…can you see the spiral forming as we all go down the drain together?

Socialist ideas are harmful and can be deadly! The sooner we destroy all remnants of support for it in America the better. The sooner we educate our kids to it’s vile “unintended” consequences, the better.

God bless the real America…the America envisioned and stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. May we return to sensible, practical solutions for those inflicted with mental illness and may we return to times when individuals take responsibility to become contributing members of society who address problems with reason and practicality, as well as compassion.

Read more from Professor Williams here.