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I didn’t realize that FR had become a Scientology haven.

I posted this article, and I am not a Scientologist. I have a doctorate in clinical psychology, and am a full time, tenured professor at a reputable university. Stop the ad hominem b.s. and stick to the facts. You can't discount the facts by aligning them with a crack-pot cult and still claim to be operating within the bounds of a reasoned argument. So bring it on.

Secondly, you have a misguided view of psychiatry history -- you've bought into the storyline of psychiatry and Big Pharma. There is another side of the story. You sound like one of those drug rep whores who work for Big Pharma. But let me set you straight.

Mental hospitals began to empty after 1955. New Jersey state hospitals, for example, held 15,000 patients then and only about 4000 today. This massive "decarceration" is widely credited to the success of the psychotropic drugs, but there is really no evidence for this. The rates of release from mental hospitals began to rise in the United States and England in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before the drugs were introduced. Prison release rates also began to rise shortly afterward. The trend toward decarceration in both kinds of institutions resulted from a recognition of the astronomical costs of the new hospitals and prisons that would be required without a reversal of the trend toward incarceration. The availability of drugs cannot explain the increased release rates in prisons, nor for the high release rates for patients with chronic brain syndromes who rarely were treated with drugs.

Let's look at the numbers, then. In 1955, there were 559,000 people in public mental hospitals, or 3.38 people per 1,000 population. In 2003, there were 5 .726 million people who received either an SSI or SSDI payment (or from both programs), and were either disabled by mental illness (SSDI statistics) or diagnosed as mentally ill (SSI statistics).' That is a disability rate of 19.69 people per 1,000 population, which is nearly six times what it was in 1955.

Those are the facts. The facts do not support the view that psychiatric medication caused the hospitals to empty. The patients just switched venues -- they became homeless, went to jail, or ended up in a group home somewhere with 24 hour supervision and a Thorazine shuffle.