Tuesday, February 05, 2013
‘Fifty Years of Failing America’s Mentally Ill’
After the recent Newtown shooting, the hope here was that
there would be more discussion about mental-illness issues in America, as
opposed to the standard politicized debate over gun control. We got the
predictable, largely ill-informed gun-control debate all right. But we still
haven’t heard much about the mental-illness side of the Newtown tragedy.
At least some people, like E. Fuller Torrey, are raising the
subject of society’s approach toward mental illness. Hub Blog’s no expert on
mental illness, but you may want to take Torrey’s WSJ broadside with a grain
of salt. It bashes away at the federal government’s policies on the mentally
ill over the past 50 years – and the federal government’s policies certainly
deserve some bashing. But mental-health reforms started by President Kennedy,
whose family grappled with its own mental-illness tragedy, were ultimately in
reaction to the prior 50 years of abysmal mental-health treatments often
administered by the states. One only has to read Michael D’Antonio’s
mini-classic ‘The State Boys Rebellion’ to understand this.
As ill-informed as it might sound, it seems to me that the
mental-health pendulum has swung from one extreme (institutionalization) to
another extreme (deinstitutionalization) over the past 100 years. If I had to
choose, I’d take the post-Kennedy reforms any day, knowing how horrible the
attitudes and treatments were towards and for the mentally ill before Kennedy's reforms. But that’s a false choice. It’s not an either-or case. Charles Krauthammer has touched upon this issue before. It still needs to be addressed more fully.
