Mental Illness and Homelessness
Most of the Tuesday evenings are incomplete for me without listening to the voice of the Will_Lyman during Frontline program broadcast over Public Television.
This past Tuesday Frontline broadcast a documentary which was sequel to this original documentary broadcast in 2005
The 2005 program titled New Asylums discussed the national trend of using the prison to lock up mentally ill and release them, only to see the mentally ill come back to jails with in months.
The program telecast last week saw the developments in the lives of few inmates over the intervening years the news was not good most of the inmates tracked alternated between homelessness, crime and prison.
This phenomena can be tracked to decision in the past years to close the asylums and allow the mentally ill to recover in free environment and in community. The objectives of the policy has not been achieved.
If one sees the movie Soloist, it will become clear the amount of effort that goes into keeping mentally ill out of trouble and in safety.
It is estimated 1,000,000 mentally ill in prison in US who will be out in some time most of them will be out without the knowledge of good and bad, and no skills to survive in this world.
We expect the powerful nation ever to exist in this world to perform the moral duty of protecting the weakest, that contract has been abrogated, it's the duty of the civil society to do something about it.
Comments