Marta Russell

"In the second half of the twentieth century, the dominance of the mental health institution began to decline as the capitalist economy underwent restructuring. Economic stagnation and low profits, the fiscal crisis of the seventies, were met with Reaganomics, i.e., tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, an attack on labor, deregulation of health and safety regulations and cuts in state spending on education, welfare, and social programs, including those institutions housing people with mental illnesses.

Deinstitutionalization, as it related to those who had been labeled mentally ill, was a government policy change driven by cost-cutting motives. Spending by the fifty states on treatment for people with mental illness, for instance, was lower by a third in the nineties than it was in the fifties; fewer than half of Americans diagnosed with schizophrenia receive adequate services today. When the awful snake pits of neglect and abuse we called “mental institutions” were closed, necessary new structures and solutions...designed and run by disabled individuals themselves, were never put in place.

Instead, GOP revolutionaries of the 104th Congress, falsely blaming the deficit on the welfare state and entitlements, attacked the social safety net. The 1990’s crackdown on federal disability and welfare benefits and state reductions to General Relief and Medicaid further expanded the scope of damage to deinstitutionalized people who had been diagnosed with mental illness, many of whom found themselves destitute the moment they were discharged from the hospitals''.

Marta Russell