I read the entire article and it’s fascinating. It’s hard to conclude our “humane” approach has been good for society OR the mentally ill.
I read a lot about asylums a couple of years ago while doing some research on old and disappearing institutional buildings. There was an entire group devoted to the architecture of asylums designed by a Dr. Kirkbride that stressed open air and spaces ease of access and ability to watch patients. Very beautiful and creepy buildings- Gothic.
Sadly as is often the case- many of the staff and doctors running these places were sick themselves but there were countless that were compassionate and did their best to comfort and help the sickest among us.
I don’t know if our culture has the guts to even consider permanent hospitalization for those beyond help- of the sort the article you linked describes. We will continue to pay the price for not finding a way to deal with them though.
A much older cousin of mine married a mentally ill woman, although he was unaware of this at the time.
Us kids knew something was wrong with her, were even mean about it as only kids can be, but that went right over his head. She was beautiful, from a very good and very prominent family, dressed just so and her manners were impeccable. He was head over heels in love and saw nothing but that.
It turned out that her family knew, that she’d been institutionalized before. Electroconvulsive therapy had kept her from going completely off the rails, but she was absolutely terrified of ever going back to “that place.”. This caused quite the rift between the families, concealing that.
She descended further into whatever mental illness she had, not long after their marriage. He’d had a beautiful brick house built for the two of them, and after they married and moved into it, she seldom left. She let herself go, chain smoking and eating, always eating. She’d stop taking her meds, hiding them, then slip into dementia. It got so bad at times that she’d defecate in the middle of the den rather than get up to go to the toilet.
But, this older cousin of mine, he believed in his marriage vows, despite having been more or less tricked into it. Despite it all, I think he still loved her on some level. This went on for thirty years.
He’d retired and taken to landscaping the yard and remodeling the house he’d built for them as a sort of hobby, a way to pass the days, near enough to keep and eye on her but out of the house since it was not easy to be around her. One day, he had a stroke, fell down in the yard and laid there for two days, with her just looking out the window at him laying there.
He never recovered, dying a few weeks later, at age 65. She has been well cared for, he saw to that. In a secure assisted living facility. She should have been there long ago, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
Some people are a threat to themselves, and others, and at present, there is no medical treatment to fix that. So now, we're forced to listen to the same liberals who insisted on deinstitutionalization that we have to disarm society to make ourselves safe from the psychotics they themselves set loose.