In the olden days there were a lot of smaller hospitals which treated only patients with a mental health diagnosis. There was generally enough money available through insurance to cover two weeks. When the money ran out, the patient was deemed to be well, discharged and no benefit dollars available for any kind of adequate follow-up until the next calendar year’s benefits were renewed. Lots of psychiatrists and hospitals made a whole lot of money in a relatively short period of time but only compounded the problem.
We also used to have state institutions and lots of “old folks homes”. I remember one in Osawatomie, Kansas, which when I was small was referred to the “Funny Farm”. I thought it was interesting that Obama went there to speak about his health care proposal - apparently no one on his staff did any homework on the history of the place.
No doubt some of the places over medicated, were inhumane and some people had no business being incarcerated there. But they did serve a purpose for a portion of our society.
I wonder if the percentage of dangerously mentally ill has grown or if there are just almost no services available to them. We hear of so many programs “for the children”. The long term care of the dangerously mentally ill is an issue that needs to be publicly discussed and resolved.
The press will not even cover Gosnell’s trial so I would not expect them address the mental health needs.
Mental health is one thing I think we can at least give a partial pass to the MSM over, for the simple reason that most people don’t want to think about it at all, and will go to lengths to avoid thinking about it.
Even the courts have an extremely hard time dealing with it. For a brief time in the 1960s, criminals discovered that they could evade decades in prison by feigning mental illness. Then the courts clamped down on it, so many truly mentally ill people were instead sent to prison, though they were incapable of caring for themselves.
Finally, in the 1980s, some “half measures” were introduced, like sentences of “guilty but insane”, so that even if a doctor later said they were sane, they still remained behind bars.
Amusingly, some Islamist terrorists were not aware of this, and had used the ordinary insanity defense successfully in other countries to evade punishment, only to find out that trying that in the US was guaranteed to earn them the maximum sentence.
But the judges are for the most part rather good at divining is someone is indeed truly insane, and is going to be spending the rest of their lives in a mental hospital; or just faking it. The “temporary insanity” or “insanity due to severe duress” defense is now the gray area.
An odd example of this was in the assassination of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, by a former supervisor Dan White. At his trial, White’s attorney used a temporary insanity defense, which is notoriously known as the “Twinkie” defense, claiming that White had eaten a Hostess Twinkie, and it had so destabilized his blood sugar that he had become temporarily insane.
Oddly enough, it halfway worked, with him not being convicted of two counts of murder, but of two counts of manslaughter, receiving only 7 years in prison, serving 5 before his release.
And yet, there is a good question as to whether White actually *did* have mental illness, because just two years after his release, utterly vilified in San Francisco, he committed suicide.