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Absolutely. This is “community based mental health care.” In all fairness, it’s a product of both the right, which didn’t want to pay for mental hospitals, and the left, which, under the Langian psychological models promoted at Teachers’ College, said that only the mad were truly sane.

Ronald Reagan, unfortunately, was one of the leading lights of “deinstitutionalization” in California, and at one point famously suggested that the mentally ill could get jobs as playground monitors.

But this all started with the report of one Geraldo Rivera on Willowbrook, an institution on Staten Island, which in general actually had fairly good care. He focused on restraining cages that were used for people having violent episodes. This was actually a step ahead, because previously they had been put in isolation (the famous padded rooms), but they were now permitted to be in the day room but had to be separated from the rest of the residents because they were a danger to them. This was before anti-psychotic drugs were as well developed as they are now, incidentally.

So he whipped up hysteria about this, and it combined with Lang’s message that capitalism was driving people crazy, and presto...instant leftwing lunacy.

But it was reinforced by the right, so the blame is pretty evenly distributed.

The odd thing is that the mental hospitals, in most cases, remained where they were, fully staffed...and empty. This is because they were usually located in remote rural areas and were the only employment in the town. So nobody from either party ever shut them down entirely, and meanwhile, the mentally ill were rampaging through the country.

The cost of deinstitutionalization has been estimated to be enormous, not only in the lost lives and consequent lost wages and productivity of their victims, but in everything from emergency room costs and policing costs to street cleaning costs.

That’s what needs to be changed.