Okay, so lets do a little review of the recent history of mental health in the US and we'll se that privatization is just the latest in the ill-thought-outmess of our national resolve and conseguent policies...

As a result of the 60's revolution we collectively focused on the individual as valuable and salvagable and so we said, "Hey, why are we institutionalizing so many folks who suffer from mental illness???"...

This was a noable question to ask and so many people who would have spent their entire lives were "de-institutionalized", reassigned back into society and with adaquate funding for mental health, adult service and adult day care programs, many did well for extended periods of time before needing little ***refresher courses***, ahhhh, you know, another 30 or 60 days in state hospitals... Some actually assimilated back into society and are still functioning...

But then with the Ray-gun administartion the funds for the support programs was drastically cut and so the states were scurrying trying to find funds for mental health and those funds weren't there and so things began to unravel and have been unraveling ever since...

But what came out of this unraveling process is that what, in essence, occured is that hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people, who once were "institutionalized" in mental health hospitals where they had at least some services and medications and stability, or "de-istitutionalizd" and had a funded support system on the "outside" (living in the community) was there was now little of either...

Huh???

Yeah, $$$ for mental health, be it for programs to support the "de-institutionalized", or for those temporarially "institutionalized" just got cut, cut and cut some more and...

...guess where these folk have ended up???

Ya give???

In our prison/industrial complex, that's where!!!

Yes, out prisons are now filled with mentally ill people...

Hey, don't believe me... Janie will tell you, too... This is America's dirty little secret.. Every socail worker in adult service who has been around since the 70's knows this...

(But, Bobert, what does this have to do with Janie and this discussion???...)

Think about it...

Bobert