1.6 Summary
- Mental disorders include mental health diagnoses as well as intellectual and developmental disorders. Though some mental disorders are not disabling, many people with mental disorders are part of the larger population of people with disabilities who struggle to have equal access to opportunities.
- Criminal justice facilities are the United States’ largest facilities for treating mental disorders. This is a result of a lengthy and complex history of failure to meet the needs of this population in humane and productive ways.
- Measures meant to treat or manage mental disorders throughout history have ranged from exclusionary to cruel, and even murderous, revealing a societal disdain for people with mental disorders that, to some extent, continues into the modern day.
- Reforms over time have eliminated or reduced obvious cruelties, but often created new problems. For example, the shift of people with mental disorders into state hospitals to be “cured” ushered in a century of institutionalizing people, taking them away from community and family, to the detriment of all.
- Institutions meant to shelter people with mental disorders devolved into overcrowded, prison-like facilities with rampant abuse and use of techniques such as forced sterilization that thoroughly dehumanized their occupants.
- Closure of institutions for people with mental disorders, in the process called deinstitutionalization, was both an enormous victory for people with mental disorders — and an introduction of a new set of challenges as communities attempted to address a population who needed their needs met in the community.
- The needs of people with mental disorders have not been met adequately in the community. Deinstitutionalization collided with a rise in substance use issues and a rapid increase in criminal prosecution and use of prison sentences to deal with these problems, to add to the mentally ill and disabled population in America’s criminal justice system. Issues such as housing shortages and unavailability of health care add to this problem.
1.6.1 Key Terms
- Antipsychotic medications
- Asylum
- Cognitive disabilities
- Community Mental Health Act
- Deinstitutionalization
- Dignity of risk
- Disability Rights Movement
- Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)
- Eugenics
- Institutionalization
- Lobotomy
- Mental disorders
- Moral treatment
- National Mental Health Act
- State hospitals
- Stigma
- Transinstitutionalization