According to American psychiatrist Loren Mosher, most deinstitutionalization in the USA took place after 1972, as a result of the availability of SSI and Social Security Disability, long after the antipsychotic drugs were used universally in state hospitals.[3] This period marked the growth in community support funds and community development, including early group homes, the first community mental health apartment programs, drop-in and transitional employment, and sheltered workshops in the community which predated community forms of supportive housing and supported living.
According to psychiatrist and author Thomas Szasz, deinstitutionalisation is the policy and practice of transferring homeless, involuntarily hospitalised mental patients from state mental hospitals into many different kinds of de facto psychiatric institutions funded largely by the federal government. These federally subsidised institutions began in the United States and were quickly adopted by most Western governments. The plan was set in motion by the Community Mental Health Act as a part of John F. Kennedy's legislation [clarification needed] and passed by the U.S. Congress in 1963, mandating the appointment of a commission to make recommendations for "combating mental illness in the United States".[4]
In many cases the deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill in the Western world from the 1960s onward has translated into policies of "community release". Individuals who previously would have been in mental institutions are no longer continuously supervised by health care workers. Some experts, such as E. Fuller Torrey, have considered deinstitutionalisation to be a failure,[5] while some consider many aspects of institutionalization to have been worse.
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In 1973, a federal district court ruled in Souder v. Brennan that patients in mental health institutions must be considered employees and paid the minimum wage required by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 whenever they performed any activity that conferred an economic benefit on an institution. Following this ruling, institutional peonage was outlawed, as evidenced in Pennsylvania's Institutional Peonage Abolishment Act of 1973.
Many assume that the advent of modern psychotropic medications was the catalyst for deinstitutionalization in the U.S. However, large numbers of patients began leaving state institutions only after new laws made unpaid patient labor illegal. In other words, when patients no longer worked for free, the economic viability of many state institutions ceased and this led to the closing of many state hospitals.[26]
Folks, this is a *breaking news* thread about a specific story. If your posts aren't clearly, and primarily, tied directly to the story, then you should not be making them in this thread. If you want to talk about broader notions of gun control or mental health reform, start threads in the appropriate areas for that. Continued attempts to derail this thread into a broad discussion about guns, as opposed to one narrowly about a specific news story, will cause action to be taken
