Economic-Political Issues and the Impact of Chronic Mental Illness

Abstract

In the United States, the number of institutionalized mental patients rose for a century until it reached 557,000 in 1957, when the situation turned around and the number declined to 150,000 patients in institutions. Everyone is familiar with these figures. We know about the use of psychotropic drugs that started at about that time, before the community mental health center movement. If things had continued as they had for a century, we would now have 1.3 million patients in mental institutions. Where are those people right now? About one third of them are walking the streets of the country, a third are in nursing homes, and a third were in nursing homes or state hospitals. That is the story of more than one million people for the last 20 years.