Can we finally admit that it didn't work?

The experiment has been going on for more than 50 years now.  It was obvious that it didn't work after the first 10.  I am talking about closing the state mental hospitals and dumping the mentally ill onto the streets.  Thus began a flood of homelessness.

The idea sounded good, release them to community based facilities, where they would receive care close to their homes and families, not in the snake pits that many state hospitals had become.  But in a short time those community based facilities first became for-profit businesses, squeezing out the treatment part to increase profit margins.  Snake pits worse than the state hospitals they were replacing. Then the funding for even those dried up.

What we have today is a patchwork of good, bad, and non-existent treatment, and none of it is designed to address truly long term problems.

There is no cure for schizophrenia.  For many, it can be managed with medication, but it doesn't go away.

So those with schizophrenia require life long treatment.  Not necessarily life long hospitalization, but neither can they be shoved out into the street with nobody checking in with them, making sure they are taking their medication.  We no longer have any system to do that.  Unless someone has a rich relative to pay for private hospitalization, they are out of luck.

Not all the homeless are mentally ill.  There are runaway teenagers.  There are people that used to have a decent job, but our economy has failed them.  There are people with substance abuse problems. And even among the mentally ill, there are probably many who with treatment could be re-integrated into society.

Rebuilding the state hospital system is not a cure-all.  It doesn't solve all the problems of homelessness and mental illness.  But it does something, which is much better than the nothing or almost nothing that we are doing now.

The old system had serious flaws.  I hope we have learned what we did wrong in that old system, so we can do better next time.  But even with all of it's flaws, it was better than what we have replaced it with.

We tried something else, and it didn't work.  Is there anyone who thinks what we are doing now is working better than what it replaced?  I mean really, anyone?

For all it's flaws, the state hospital system was a treatment of last resort for many.  It is time to bring it back.
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