Mental Health Issues

What do psychiatric hospitals, jails, and community mental health centers all have in common? Millions of mentally ill people. For more than 50 years, mentally ill people have been subjected to barbaric and unsatisfactory conditions, and have been limited by the politics and policies of mental health. Although the intentions were probably ethical in the beginning a large number of disastrous situations arose, including both the incarceration, and removal of masses of mentally ill patients. American Psychosis by E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., the executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services at the University of Health Sciences, focuses on

This situation had an astronomical influence on John F. Kennedy, who was the closest to Rosemary, and because of that he went to great lengths to change the way people with both special needs and mental illnesses were treated. On December 1, 1961 Kennedy created a committee called the Interagency Committee on Mental Health. The committee was asked to make recommendations on future mental illness services in state hospitals and on possible ways to increase mental health professions. The first issue addressed by the committee dealt with state hospitals. The Interagency Committee on Mental Health’s major concern was whether or not they should continue treatment in state hospitals or shift their focus to community mental health centers. Their decision was to ultimately shut these asylums down. As specified by Fuller, with all the horrific things that happened in these mental hospitals, the committee thought they were doing the patients a service by closing these institutions down, little did they know that a numerous amount of patients had no families to go back to. As a result, a swarm of these patients were homeless, out on the streets with brain impairments and in need of medication. Most of these people unfortunately ended up in jail or committed

To further his suspicions of psychiatrists the CMHCs openly encouraged poor people to vote who, Nixon knew, were not likely to vote Republican. As the battle between the two continued, despite the communist accusations, CMHCs continued to open all over. The only problem now was that the five year staffing grants given to these centers were being misused.

According to NIMH records, the largest numbers of CMHC patients were diagnosed with “social maladjustment or no mental disorder.” Among the 789 community mental health centers funded by the government, only a few provided care for patients who were discharged from the state hospitals. But this does not even touch the surface of the kind of abuse that was going on within this system. Centers all over the U.S. were using their funds for luxuries such as swimming pools, maids, and gardeners. Unfortunately this once praiseworthy idea, had little impact on improving the mental health system in the magnitude they had hoped it would. In a since it just replaced one inadequate program with