| jplinville |
12-18-2012 09:57 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by t walgamuth
(Post 3068227)
Reagan-era cuts slashed mental health care
If you google you will find numerous articles related to the Reagan era cuts to mental health funding. this is just the first article listed. The above institution happened to close before them but I believe a lot more closed afterward.
|
Actually, if you look at the patient's rights movement that started in the '60's, they started closing places down, not Reagan. They forced the issue to make it illegal to forcibly treat patients. They began righting guidlines which were used to determine if someone could take care of themselves, such as washing themselves, cooking, etc. Once they were able to get people to that level, they were released from the facility.
Reagan merely cut wasteful funding for care that was no longer being given in the mental health field. That money wasn't meant for research, it was meant for care, and these people were getting to the point that the facilities no longer needed to care for them, according to the guidelines.
Had the mental health community been proactive, instead of reactive, then the cut backs would have still happened, but funding would have been transferred to another "account" to fund their projects. Ultimately, funding for these places came from state funding, not Federal funding.
Mental institutions
Quote:
In the first half of the 1900s asylums (or ‘mental hospitals’) became testing grounds for controversial treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and lobotomy. These methods helped some patients function again, but they irreparably harmed others. Such therapies became widely used because doctors and nurses wanted to offer patients cutting-edge treatment. ECT and lobotomy, however, reinforced an old and persistent image of asylums as intimidating places of last resort.
Many mental hospitals closed in the 1970s and 1980s. This was due to pressure from the antipsychiatry movement, feminist criticism, ex-patient activism and political suspicion of large, unaccountable institutions. Other mental hospitals were converted to ‘short-stay’ treatment centres - a policy enabled by new psychiatric drugs. In the UK this was called ‘care in the community’.
Many patients were left homeless. Others, especially people with profound intellectual disability or brain damage, remain institutionalised in ‘care homes’ their entire lives. Such patients and ex-patients depend on loved ones or charity to weather political and economic changes. People without such shelter are often forgotten. This distantly echoes the situation of people called ‘mad’ in the Middle Ages.
|
|
