One thing that visitors from other countries–-we see a lot of Finns in our house––notice is that there are a lot of homeless people on our streets here in San Francisco, and that many of them are clearly mentally ill.
I was reading this article on Mute (whose tagline is the intriguing “WE GLADLY FEAST ON THOSE WHO WOULD SUBDUE US”) on the anti-psychiatry activities of an Italian psychiatrist in the 1960s, Franco Basaglia, and a book about him, The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care.
All of this led me to look up the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, and then to this Timeline of Deinstitutionalization and its Consequences–all which made made ever clearer that mental health care in this country has gone from abuse to neglect, that more people in need of care are on the streets or in jails rather than in hospitals, all of which is a terrible crime against already suffering people.
Basaglia: ‘It seems important that people know that beyond “health” and “illness” there are human beings and there are contradictions that we cannot master individually.’
Caterina.net 