But we need to keep down the recorded rate of unemployment.

The percentage seems high for "seriously mentally ill", but that may be just a definitional matter. The percentage however would be much higher if it included those who suffer from occasional mental disfunction (domestic abuse, substance abuse, etc.)

Here is an excerpt from arelevant web site
http://www.islandnet.com/~hoffer/hofferhp.htm

Schizophrenia remains one of the most serious chronic diseases, attacking 1 to 2% of the population. Forty years ago patients suffering from schizophrenia occupied half of all the mental hospital beds and one-quarter of all hospital beds. Today, most of the mental hospitals have shut down but they have not disappeared. By refusing to accept patients,and by discharging them before they are ready for independent living, they converted the community into the new mental hospitals. About half of the homeless people on our streets are schizophrenics, many of whom have been treated in mental hospitals or psychiatric wards, placed on tranquilizers, and then discharged to fend for themselves.

The main difference is that formerly they were treated in inadequate hospitals, which provided shelter, food, nursing care and some medical care. Patients were protected from society and society was protected from the more violent aggressive psychotic patients. These patients had little personal freedom. Today, the modern mental hospital, which is the streets with their rundown hotels, nursing homes, foster homes and so on, provides tranquilizers for some, pays no attention to food, provides little shelter and provides no protection for patients and for society. But they do have much more freedom to be sick, to roam, to refuse medication, to prey upon others, to be preyed upon by others.

The end results are the same. Patients do not recover. The recovery rate today is certainly under 15% which is one-third of the recovery rate achieved in 1950 in England and in the USA in the Dorothea Lynde Dix hospital in the eastern part of the country. In my opinion, the street schizophrenics today are no better off than they were in 1950. They suffered tremendously then from psychiatric ignorance from this socially rejected disease, and they suffer today from psychiatric refusal to examine a much better treatment called orthomolecular therapy.

Modern drugs, primarily tranquilizers, are very helpful in ameliorating the symptoms of the disease, but by themselves they can not and do not lead to recovery. Psychiatric chemotherapy is equivalent to chemotherapy practiced by oncologists for most forms of cancer, they do little good and cause a lot of harm. Psychiatric chemotherapy leaves the unfortunate patients with a dismal choice: (1) to remain naturally psychotic without the benefit of these drugs in reducing suffering or, (2) suffering the iatrogenic organic disease, the tranquilizer psychosis.

Tranquilizers, no matter how helpful, create a major dilemma for patients and their psychiatrists. Given to patients, they help reduce the frequency and intensity of the symptoms, but given to normal people they make them sick. Under the communist regime in Russia, dissidents were locked up in mental hospitals and given tranquilizers. They were using their peculiar definition of mental illness, i.e. a person who disagreed with the system. These people were made psychotic by the tranquilizers. When patients are given the same drugs they begin to get better, their symptoms are alleviated to some degree, they are more comfortable and their families being to feel hopeful again that they will recover. But as they become better or more normal, they begin to respond to these drugs as if they were normal, i.e. they become sick.

The tranquilizer psychosis created by these drugs includes psychiatric and physical symptoms. The pyschiatric symptoms are apathy, disinterest, poor concentration and memory problems so they can not study and learn, personality deterioration, and inablity to function without supervision. On the physical side they develop tardive dyskinesia, other types of neurological conditions, impotence, obesity, and skin problems. Patients are no more fond of these latter symptoms than they are of their natural schizophrenia, and many prefer to be psychotic rather than suffer the ravages of this iatrogenic disease.

Also, look at the growing rate of violence against increasingly overwhelmed and understaffed social service workers who are forced to deal with more potentially violent persons who would benefit from a more structured environment. Outpatient mental health and social service agencies were already cut to the bone before the current recession and state budget problems.

Meanwhile, corrections officers in the prisons will be the first to tell you that they are not trained to address the problems of seriously mentally ill persons. Plus, mentally ill persons have been found more likely to be involved in violent confrontations in prisons, making an already bad situation worse.

If you want to read a really depressing report from a couple of years ago, go here: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/mhtip.pdf

Newer generation antipsychotics have far fewer side effects that those you describe, Rajiv. Unfortunately, most of those are so expensive that they're out of most patients' reach.

That sounds like a neat site -- I will check it out.

and to think some people want to privitize the prison system...what would happen then.