From: Failing The Mentally ill (heavily edited)
The destruction of our mental health system started with the idea that mental illness does not exist because the mind cannot be diseased.
But, in fact, the brain is just as susceptible to malfunction as any bodily organ.
And, even now, when the consequences of radical deinstitutionalization should
have become clear to everyone, the bad idea lives on.
How could it become so influential?
The idea began with Thomas Szasz and would have remained a fringe curiosity had the counter-culture and political radicals not taken him up along with the similar misconceptions of R.D. Laing.
The mentally ill became a group to be liberated.
Indeed some countercultural intellectuals went so far as to claim that the sane were mad and the mad were sane because they so radically rejected the corrupt established culture.
Deinstitutionalization was also attractive to people eager to cut costs.
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967 inaugurated a wave of state legislation sharply restricting the grounds for involuntary hospitalization and its length.
It passed both houses without a single dissenting vote. Conservative Republicans saw a way to save money, liberal Democrats a way to expand civil rights.
The promise of saving money by doing good was irresistible.
Unfortunately, the humane community treatment for the mentally ill that was
supposed to replace institutionalization never materialized and the
families of mentally ill people are forced to navigate a hopelessly
fragmented system where the “right to refuse
treatment” far outweighed the right to receive it.