Comments on the role played by civil libertarians? Ed Koch fought the NYCLU for yrs. about a schizophrenic woman who was a danger to herself and others, about what is called here in Ca., the, "5150, " 72 hr. involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill. I had to call the police once on a housemate who had stopped taking her lithium and was hallacinating that she was in Auschwitz.
That far from adequate funding was given to half way houses and other
community mental health is the other side of the picture.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Reagan's+closing+of+the+mental+hospitals
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg120899.html
> ...They were all the victims, it turns out, of liberals, libertarians,
> and conservatives. The liberals and libertarians banded together under
> the rubric of "liberating the so-called mentally ill." The intellectual
> godfather of this monstrosity was Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who had
> written The Myth of Mental Illness in 1961. He wrote, " 'Mental illness'
> is [only] a metaphor. Minds can be 'sick' only in the sense that jokes
> are 'sick' or economics are 'sick.' " The NYCLU got the fanciful idea
> that anybody who was restrained against his will was unjustly
> incarcerated, even if these people thought a duck is a radio transmitter
> and believed puddle-water had all the vitamins a human needs. So, they
> emptied out the mental hospitals — which, to be honest, were really awful
> places — and set the inmates loose on the streets, pumped up with a bunch
> of drugs that kept them safe and non-violent — until the drugs wore off.
> The liberators figured that these unhinged people would have the good
> sense to seek treatment as outpatients.
So why were conservatives to blame too? Because they went along with the whole scheme to save money. Closing the mental hospitals was a revenue windfall, so they turned a blind eye. The fact is, there are some legitimate government functions. Amitai Etzioni, in perhaps the only brief and interesting thing he's ever said, observed long ago that children do not fit the libertarian paradigm. Well, the mentally ill don't either. Government needs to make mature decisions about what to do with damaged people. Letting them die of frostbite in the name of liberty or Clintonian compassion is not a mature decision.
R.D. Laing (see the hilarious novel by Clancy Sigal on Laing.)