Thankfully, reforms led to humane medical treatments in regulated, safe, compassionate, competent and effective environments in for-profit and tax-supported institutions.
Inmates became patients. Commitment was either voluntary or ordered by courts only after clear evidence that a person was dangerous to himself or others because of mental or emotional illness.
Then two monkey wrenches destroyed America's brief experiment with psychiatric welfare: successful civil-rights lawsuits and taxpayer revolts.
Lawyers representing patients launched successful legal challenges in class-action lawsuits, maintaining that their clients had the right to end their civil commitments whenever they wished if they were not criminally insane.
Then taxpayers pressured legislatures to downsize and close state hospitals, replacing them with allegedly less-expensive and more-effective group homes and outpatient clinics in the patients' own communities.
Guess what? The patients were expelled into hostile urban environments without survival skills and ended up as vagrants, bag people, street people, crime victims, jail inmates and beggars because they declined to take their psychotropic medications and lacked the social and other skills to maintain normal lives.
America's streets, underpasses and prisons now have become the new "snake pits." (3 OCTOBER 1999)
