The Wishful Thinking that Put Thousands on the Streets

Let’s look at the reasoning, and numbers, of deinstitutionalization—America’s mid-century policy of moving the mentally ill population out of large hospitals of widely varying quality and into home-based care and community integration. In 1955, state mental hospitals housed 559,000 patients. That number dropped by 80 percent during the next three decades and then dropped further. Seven Read more...

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