Letter: Approach to mental illness not working

It is time to declare psychiatric deinstutionalization an abject failure.

Beginning in the 1950s, California began to move their chronically mentally ill population from large state-run hospitals into nursing homes, group homes and other board of care facilities. Other states soon followed suit, with many large state hospitals shuttered or significantly downsized by the early 1980s.

This was undoubtedly a well-intentioned plan to move mentally ill patients from facilities that were aging and in many instances providing poor care, into a better setting. The idea was to reintegrate people suffering from mental illness back into their local communities.

So what went wrong?

In a word funding - or lack of funding. In 1980, President Carter signed the "Mental Health Systems Act" to promote community mental health clinics. This initiative was never properly funded. Shortly after President Reagan took office in 1981, the funds were diverted into state block grants.

This left thousands of individuals suffering from chronic mental illness with nowhere to turn, resulting in an explosion of homelessness. Hospital emergency departments became the de facto provider of mental health services. This situation has only become more dire in the subsequent decades.

The largest provider of mental health services in the state of Illinois happens to be Cook County Jail. There is no national policy to address the chronically mentally ill. When the large state hospitals began to close, the patient population did not miraculously improve. We see the evidence of this on any given day in any large city.

We need to reimagine a better solution to care for this very fragile and vulnerable population. And it may require government-funded long-term care facilities that are more humane than their predecessors. What exists presently is a shameful patchwork of inefficient and ineffective emergency psychiatric care.

This is a critical moral issue.

Greg Newlin

Aurora