Social Consequences of Policy Toward Mental Illness

Abstract

The care and treatment of the mentally ill, although providing the impetus for the social reform movement, receded into the background, increasingly impervious to the research and data it had generated. Consequently, the impetus of the mental health movement to obtain resources for purposes explicitly related to mental illness were diffused to broader social goals and welfare philosophies which may affect the chimera, mental health. The range and sequence of innovative treatment modalities were never implemented, as political enthusiasm, fed by inflated rhetoric, moved to community treatment, eradication of social ills and the elimination of the publicly supported mental institution. It is highly conjectural that the severely mentally ill had their lot that improved in the process.