I unfairly blamed Mrs. Thatcher for closing down all the old British mental hospitals and turfing the inmates out onto the streets, then suggesting to Ronald Reagan that he should follow suit. Wrong! This process started in 1955 in the United States. Prior to the 1960s psychiatric care was run by the States, but with the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid, the states dumped the mentally ill onto the Federal taxpayer. Since then everyone has tried to avoid caring for and paying for these unfortunates, and many patients have ended up in nursing homes and general hospitals with inadequate care or out on the streets with no care at all. See a lucid account of this problem and its history on http://www.psychlaws.org/generalresources/fact2.htm
Now, at any given time there are more individuals with schizophrenia who are homeless and living on American streets or incarcerated in jails and prisons than there are in hospitals:
- Approximately 200,000 individuals with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness are homeless, constituting one-third of the estimated 600,000 homeless population. Many eat from garbage cans and are victimized regularly.
- Nearly 300,000 individuals with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness, or 16 percent of the total inmate population, are in jails and prisons, primarily charged with misdemeanors, but some charged with felonies, that were caused by their psychotic thinking.
- Less than 70,000 individuals with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness are in state psychiatric hospitals receiving treatment for their disease.
Nothing will change because conservative voters care chiefly about their level of taxation and little about their "communities" (mutters of "what communities"?)