A Movement That Ended In Systemic Disaster

This issue: We look at how communities are responding, more than a half-century later, to the fallout from deinstitutionalization; a school dedicated to helping children with mental health challenges.

Most asylums were not nice places. The conditions at what were typically state-funded psychiatric hospitals were often deplorable, sometimes brutal, and people with severe mental illness often languished inside these institutions their entire lives without proper treatment. But not all were like that. Some were run well, and staffed by people with compassion and care. 

More than half a century ago, a movement to empty the country’s stigmatized psychiatric hospitals and place patients in their communities to receive treatment was considered a progressive model for mental care. 

The country is still grappling with the unintended consequences.

Today, high numbers of homeless people are suffering on the streets, many of them without access to healthcare services of any kind. Hospital beds for psychiatric patients are scarce. And many thousands of people with severe mental illnesses are being warehoused in jails and nursing homes because there is nowhere else for them to go. The pandemic has …