We see them out there in the street all the time, the lost, the homeless.

They're not just the alcoholics, the lazy, the out of work or the romantic loner. Many, maybe most, are seriously mentally ill and should be under care. In the 60's and 70's a huge program was undertaken to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. The aim was to remove them from huge, impersonal state hospitals so that they could be more humanely treated at mental health clinics in their communities.

In 1963 when congress passed the Community Mental Health Centers Act President Kennedy said, "Reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability."

But it didn't work out quite that way. The number of mental patients in public health hospitals dropped by almost half a million. They didn't end up being treated in community clinics though. They wandered out into society and became part of a huge rootless and homeless population in our country. The late psychiatrist, seymour Kaplan, who pioneered the deinstitutionalization in N.Y state said later that it was the greatset error he had ever made.

In many cities the jails have now become the alternative to'custodial isolation'. The mentally ill are simply taken off the streets and put into jail when deemed a problem. The observations in a study by Public Citizen Health Research group are frightening:
'U.S returns to 1820's in care of the mentall ill.'
'The Los Angeles county jail is labelled America's largest 'mental hospital.' The study is replete with examples from every state.

The first two crises they list in their top eight are:

1. There are more than twice as many people with schizophrencia and manic-depressive psychosis living in public shelters and on the streets than there are in public mental hospitals.

2. There are more people with schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis in prisons and jails than in public mental hospitals.

The problem seems endemic throughtout the country. I would love to take a look at this problem to try to show what it must feel like to be treated in this way.