09-26-2008, 12:44 PM
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#212 (permalink)
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| is chasing her tail
Ninja of love
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 5,041
SL Join Date: July 3, 2008
Business: Wandering about in a daze. Tabbing out.
Awards: 1 
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Originally Posted by Lucifer Baphomet  Gotta disagree with you Mero.
Massive increases of mentally ill homeless people are a direct result of "care in the community" programs.
Closures of long term hospitals on both sides of the atlantic have led to huge numbers of mentally ill people on the streets. | Quote:
Originally Posted by Merovigan Show me some numbers. From what I saw posted, it said that closing hospitals hadn't been an issue since the 1940's.
Beyond that, my main issue is with beggars, not homeless - they are not the same thing. | Quote:
From the Electronic Journal of Sociology: Ronald Reagan and the Commitment of the Mentally Ill: Capital, Interest Groups, and the Eclipse of Social Policy
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During the early 1960s a series of initiatives designed to reform the mental health system were passed. At issue was the system of state run hospitals for the mentally ill, which were increasingly perceived as inhumane and, with the help of new medications, rather unnecessary for large portions of the patient population. In 1961, the Joint Commission on Mental Illness released Action for Mental Health, calling for the integration of the mentally ill into the general public with the aid of Community Mental Health Centers. In 1963, the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers instituted the centers, but due to the financial drain of the Vietnam War during the 1960s and the financial crisis of the 1970s, the program was not fully funded.1 The result was the release of patients into an environment lacking the Community Mental Health Centers to adequately treat them (Becker and Schulberg, 1976; DeLeonardis and Mauri, 1992; Hollingsworth, 1994; Rachlin, 1974; Rachlin et al, 1975; Saathoff et al, 1992; Shwed, 1978, 1980; Talbott, 1992; Worley and Lowery, 1988 .
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Cuts in funding for mental health services continued throughout the 1980s, with the emphasis being on the provision of services via the private sector. Overall, the number of beds available to the mentally ill in public and private hospitals dropped over forty percent between 1970 and 1984 (Reamer, 1989). Most of this decline was due to cuts in public hospitals. During the 1980s, the number of beds provided by general hospitals in psychiatric wards and in private hospitals for the mentally ill increased. In 1970, there were 150 private psychiatric centers; in 1980, there were 184; by 1988, there were 450 in the United States. General hospitals offering psychiatric services increased from 1,259 in 1984 to over two thousand in 1988 (Reamer, 1989, 25; LaFond and Durham, 1992, 115-16). With such growth in the private sector, there were substantial profits to be made in mental illness, assuming that the patient had adequate health insurance. Those without medical insurance frequently did not receive adequate care.
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