NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof writes today about how we now use jails as our mental hospitals, harking back to practices two centuries ago. nytimes/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/inside-a-mental-hospital-called-jail.html?ref=todayspaper He reaches a summary I did in Crazy About You: In 1964, the year I was a junior in Larned High School and living on the grounds of Larned State Hospital, we were living in what one author called the “enlightened fourth phase” of dealing with the insane. Society had moved from 1) being afraid of the mentally ill because they were possessed of evil spirits to 2) simply protecting itself from the insane by chaining them or locking them up to 3) treating them in a humanitarian way by placing them in asylums where they were harbored but not really treated and so suffered chronic anonymity to 4) now seeing mental illness as an illness to be treated and cured. It’s just we still didn’t really have a clue how the hell to do it. Later, we’d just give up and send them back into the streets to roam at will, beg for food, be beaten by police, and again be housed with criminals. amazon/Crazy-About-You-ebook/dp/B005DC623E/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1311167216&sr=1-3
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:04:11 +0000
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