Comments on: Nothing has changed; mentally ill minority teens likely to be locked up rather than treated.

By: justice4all

justice4all — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

has closed state mental health facilities for both the young and adults...and have forced the Pine Street Inn, Rosie's Place and jail to become defacto institutions. It's a disgrace, AmberPaw. Are you paying attention, Brandeis, (the leading fosterer of this movement) - there's collateral damage to the crap that you preach.

p>I would support a "long house" and I would support the empty nester corp. Anything has to be better than rolling the dice on these kids, which is what we're doing now. There's a completely unnecessary bodycount and we must proactively plan instead of reactively "manage" these kids into early graves or jail.

By: dave-from-hvad

dave-from-hvad — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

the ideology underlying the Patrick administration's decision to close the Fernald Developmental Center for persons with mental retardation. Disclosure: as many of you know, I work for The Fernald League, which is trying to preserve this facility.

p>As is the case with deinstitutionalized teens and others with mental illness, no viable system exists to adequately care for some of the most profoundly mentally retarded persons in the state who are threatened with eviction from Fernald and potentially other state facilities. In case after case, the deinstitutionalization model has led to declining levels of care and services. This is all about an abdication of our societal and governmental responsibility to care for our most vulnerable citizens.

By: mplo

mplo — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I agree with what both of you are saying about the De-Institutionalization Movement; it's been a total disaster, because it really wasn't well though-out, and, while it's agreed that sticking mentally ill people, whoever they may be, into human warehouses out of sight and out of mind for the rest of the world, just simply turning hundreds or thousands of mentally ill people out into the streets without any kind of follow-up care isn't/wasn't the way to go, either. It's also led to more homelessness, too, because many mentally ill people have been rejected by family members and/or relatives who can't or won't be bothered with having them around, and have ended up on the streets or in homeless shelters, which many people understandably don't want to enter.

p>If, however, anything positive has come about from the de-institutionalization movement, it culminated in the closing of a number of really archaic and brutal state mental hospitals and ushered in more community-based care for most mentally ill or retarded citizens.