by Athena Thorne, PJ Media:
Why did we ever close up all those big, beautiful mental health asylums in the first place? I looked at that very question in a 2022 column called “It’s Time to Re-Institutionalize the Dangerous Mentally Ill.” (It’s behind the PJ Media paywall, but you can get a VIP membership right here for less than $20 when you use the code FIGHT.) But here is the summary of what happened from the article:
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Most advanced societies throughout history have created institutions of some sort to segregate the mentally ill from the general public. This is certainly a fair policy for normal people who are trying to go about their lives. But in practice, it often meant the institutionalized lived in deplorable conditions. Additionally, people were sometimes “put away” by others who had personal, financial, or political motives. So asylums were always (rightly) susceptible to skepticism but understood to be necessary.
Then, in the 1960s, advances in antipsychotic medicine created speculation that the severely mentally ill would be able to live an unconfined life in society again. Also beginning at this time, the large public mental health facilities, which had chiefly been financed and run by the individual states, began to be influenced by changes in financial policy. There were also a series of legal decisions over the years that chipped away at civilians’ right to enjoy a secure, peaceful society. And finally, the injection of federal money and policy into the mental health system eventually wrested the operation of large institutions away from the states that had traditionally maintained them. Medicaid incentivized states to close their facilities, and in 1981, the federal government ceased funding in-patient facilities and forced the mentally ill onto the community.
As this happened, none of it was lost on the shrewd Donald Trump. Last week, the Daily Caller’s Ryan Reese released a transcript of his interview with the president. Here are Trump’s thoughts on public custodial care of the irredeemably and dangerously mentally ill.
