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Death by "Reform"

By Kent Scheidegger et al.

Beware of reformers. Enthusiastic activists often dismiss weighty arguments on the other side and propose cures that end up being worse than the disease. So it was with the drive to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. Certainly, there were abuses. Certainly, there were people involuntarily committed who shouldn't have been. But the Cuckoo's Nest crusade took it much too far. "Apparently drafted by the law firm of Frank Kafka and Lewis Carroll, the laws on the mentally ill that have emanated from the deinstitutionalization era are both absurd and tragic." (Torrey, Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill (1988) pp. 29-30.) Homelessness is often the result of vesting the choice not to be treated in people whose illness makes them incapable of making an intelligent choice...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime and Consequences on August 18, 2008 (boomark / email).