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"the daughter can be held up to 72 hours"

This is the saddest thing about the whole situation. The daughter, who is obviously mentally incompetent, will be released into the general public in three days. She has no where to go and is far from her previous home, where she may or may not have help avaialble. She will probably become a street person and will live in danger of disease, starvation, and attack by criminals.

Why, oh why, were the facilities that used to care for these people closed and the people turned out on the streets???

Why, oh why, were the facilities that used to care for these people closed and the people turned out on the streets???

One answer: Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, agitated in the 60's that mental hospitals were set up to house people driven "crazy" by society and they were actually political prisoners.

Why, oh why, were the facilities that used to care for these people closed and the people turned out on the streets???

Two reasons, I think. The first reason was that sometimes people in mental hospitals in the 1930s-1960 *were* badly abused.

There were many exposes. Frank Wiseman in 1967 made a documentary called Titicut Follies about a notorious hospital in Massachusetts. US News says:

Tucked away in this pastoral region the Indians called Titicut, behind rolled razor wire and thick steel doors, Bridgewater State Hospital is well situated to protect its "criminally insane" inmates from prying eyes. Indeed, when Frederick Wiseman made a documentary about the facility in 1967, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court banned all public screenings (except in limited professional settings) to protect the inmates' right of privacy.

It mattered little that Wiseman had permission from state Attorney General Elliot Richardson and releases from inmates or that 10,000 visitors a year toured the institution. For 24 years, until the court reversed its decision in 1991, Wiseman's work, "Titicut Follies" (named after the patients' talent show), was the only film ever censored in America for reasons other than obscenity or national security.

Other reasons: doctors performed psychosurgery (lobotomy, leucotomy) on people against their will; people were committed indefinitely when there was little wrong with them. "Insanity" was grounds for divorce and it did happen that a husband would have a "nervous" wife committed so that he could divorce and remarry. Reporters occasionally got themselves "committed" (with an escape hatch) so that they could expose the conditions inside mental hospitals.

I also think (my personal opinion) that the huge grounds and historic old buildings of the old mental hospitals were simply too attractive to developers. These hospitals were often set up as "sanitariums" in the 19th century, because it was believed that the mentally ill needed a quiet place away from crowds and the cities. Many were sold by cash-strapped states during the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. Again, people thought that drugs and outpatient clinics were going to take care of everything.