Our National Disgrace by The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board

Author:The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heyday

IV

HOW SOCIETY BETRAYED THE MENTALLY ILL

Les Jones works on his computer in his studio apartment in Santa Monica.

IF ONLY WE COULD MAKE LES JONES’S STORY MORE commonplace. As the sixty-two-year-old Texas native leans back from his desktop computer in his small apartment, he details his journey from a successful radio career to a mental breakdown, to the streets, to shelter, and finally to treatment and a healthy, happy life in this tidy complex at perhaps the most enviable corner of Santa Monica, steps from the Third Street Promenade, a short walk to the beach.

“I am one verse,” Jones says of the composition of the American population of the mentally ill. “There are others. Modern treatment of mental illness produces miracles. It literally saved my life.”

Jones lives at Step Up on Second, the name of the apartment building and the nonprofit organization that operates it. He is serving his second stint on Step Up’s board of directors, runs a computer-training program, and helps other residents adjust to their new home.

He has lived here for eleven years.

This is permanent supportive housing. This is the type of thing Los Angeles voters are helping to build through their ballot measures and tax dollars. Jones and his neighbors each have their own apartments and lock their own doors. They visit on-site counselors and clinical staff as needed and discuss their progress, their lives, their medication. Many leave each morning for jobs.

Their lives are the promising future that policymakers and mental health professionals envisioned beginning in the 1950s, when a drug that was first developed as a sedative for surgical patients began being prescribed in psychiatric institutions and completely changed the nation’s approach to mental health. It was marketed under the name Thorazine.

It was the age of medical miracles: antibiotics like penicillin, and vaccines and treatments that virtually eliminated polio, smallpox, and diphtheria. Drugs could cure almost anything. Surely they could cure mental illness.

That post-war spirit of can-do optimism contrasted with the barbaric mental health treatment of the time. In state hospitals and asylums, staff had responded to behavioral problems with tranquilizers or, in far too many cases, abuse that verged on torture. Patients were often forcefed and treated like prisoners, which in essence they were. That was to change.

The last bill that President Kennedy signed before his assassination in 1963 was the Community Mental Health Act—a landmark law to fund and build community mental health centers. The old-style state hospitals and asylums would close and patients would come home to be treated in outpatient clinics, in supportive-housing communities, or in local inpatient hospitals. In 1967, California adopted the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which strictly limited forced hospitalization and the involuntary medication of patients.

This was deinstitutionalization, and the word had positive connotations. Civil libertarians supported patients recovering their selfdetermination. Others applauded the cost savings that came from treating people in outpatient settings. The mental health establishment—much of it anyway—expected better psychiatric outcomes and an end to abusive conditions.

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