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Great, great description of what life is like in the desinstituionalized US. This is tanks to radical leftist Langian shrinks and Ronald Reagan, who actually thought that releasing California mental patients onto the general population would save money for CA - because these people could actually work as playground monitors???.

This was a bizarre concordance of lefty lunacy which said that the only truly sane are the mentally ill, because they’re reacting against capitalism, and the right wing short-sighted tightwad mentality, which was to destroy mental hospitals because they’re costing money and anyway, the left has already told us that the loonies are just expressing their hatred of capitalism.

This is a wonderful opportunity to begin a new conversation about how both the mentally ill and the society around them can be helped by involuntary committal no matter what mother says (because clearly this kid’s mother was a major enabler). We need to install review policies and a mandatory outpatient plan, but we need to get these lunatics off the street. I can’t even hate this kid, because he was crazy. But he was enabled.

CT didn’t have such a law because the ACLU had objected to it literally a couple of months ago. CT is one of only 6 states in the nation that did not have a mandatory outpatient plan, and that was thanks to the ACLU.

I was brought up by a mentally ill mother who was always threatening to kill me (I kept a knife under my pillow) and I didn’t run away because NYC foster care was horrible and my more vulnerable younger brother would also have been sent into it. I always thought that when I became of legal age, I could have her committed...by NY law changed that year, and I couldn’t have her committed.

So she ended up on the streets for a number of years, and then finally she became so frail that the police picked her up after one of her attacks on her phantom enemies and sent her to Bellevue and the social worker (who should be canonized) contacted me. We got her into a very nice facility in the Bronx and she lived out her last years with dignity.

But she should never have had to go through this. Even back in the late 60s, early 70s, there were drugs that could control the hallucinations. But they required supervision in residential facilities, and that was where the whole thing broke down (even though there were both public and private funds to pay for this).

I read something a few years ago, and I wish I could remember where, about the costs to society of deinstitutionalization: it took into account emergency room, police and sanitation costs - and also lost wages for the injuries, deaths and funeral expenses caused by the free-roaming mentally ill. It was staggering.

Wow...sorry to hear about your very personal, very troubling experience. Just thankful that your mom finally got the help she (and your family) needed.

THIS is what/where the public focus should be, in the aftermath of the CT tragedy. If you happen to recall, or come across the report, please post. Thanks.

Thank you for telling this painful story and for your cogent analysis. I too was raised by a disturbed mother - she was borderline, so able to function in the outside world, but irrational and violent at home. I ran away when I was 16.
I don’t think that the Laingians were all bad - I think they brought to attention a very valid point, that often the designated “crazy” person is the arm on the body of a sick family that gets to be ok or whole by having the crazy one be crazy.
I know that I was sent to shrinks as an adolescent for underperforming in math - the person who needed psychiatry/therapy was my violent and abusive mother. And she was just imitating her aunt who had moved into her home when my mother’s mother died in childbirth.
I agree that it is a bad day when the utopian notions of the left converge with the simplistic, know-nothing bottom-liners on what is called the right. And don’t forget the mercenary interests of the pharmacy industry, who have been the only beneficiaries of these policies.