# Deinstitutionalisation · The Cult Dossier · The Atlas · The Congregation of Tomorrow

Source: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/atlas/library/cults/163-deinstitutionalisation/ · The Congregation of Tomorrow · the Atlas · language: en
The same words a person sees on this page, nothing more and nothing hidden.
Our own words are free to use under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), naming the Congregation of Tomorrow. Words of others keep their own terms.
Every page of the site, listed: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/ai/pages.json · the whole site in one file: https://congregationoftomorrow.org/llms-full.txt

← The Cult Dossier: all 182
The Cult Dossier · No. 163 · Psychiatry / The Asylum
Deinstitutionalisation
The Community Mental Health Act; transinstitutionalisation
1955 – present · United States, with parallels across the developed world
XV. THE ASYLUM — WHEN MEDICINE DECIDED WHOSE MIND WAS WRONG
None.
### Who led it
### What it worshipped and taught
### Who was in it
### How it ended, or where it stands
### The dead
### Of note
### Its timeline
- 1954 CHLORPROMAZINE, sold as THORAZINE, is approved in the United States. For the first time psychosis can be suppressed pharmacologically, and discharge becomes conceivable at scale.
- 1955 The resident population of American public psychiatric hospitals peaks at roughly 560,000.
- 31 OCTOBER 1963 KENNEDY SIGNS THE COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH ACT, funding a national network of community centres to replace the asylums. He is assassinated three weeks later. ONLY HALF OF THE PROPOSED CENTRES ARE EVER BUILT, NONE IS FULLY FUNDED, AND THE ACT PROVIDES NO MONEY TO RUN THEM LONG-TERM.
- 2 SEPTEMBER 1967 GOVERNOR RONALD REAGAN signs California's LANTERMAN-PETRIS-SHORT ACT, in force from 1969: no one may be held against their will for more than 72 hours without a hearing, and the counties take over care with no obligation to provide it. Other states follow. The legal grounds for holding people disappear at the same time as the funding for treating them.
- 1970s–90s State hospitals close across the country. THE PROMISED COMMUNITY SYSTEM DOES NOT ARRIVE, and the discharged population appears instead in single-room occupancy hotels, on the street, and in county jails.
- 2014 TRANSINSTITUTIONALISATION IS MEASURABLE. An estimated 383,000 people with severe mental illness are incarcerated — roughly TEN TIMES the number remaining in state psychiatric hospitals. Around 20 per cent of jail inmates and 15 per cent of state prison inmates have a serious mental illness.
- Present The debate has reopened in several jurisdictions over whether involuntary treatment should be easier to obtain, which is the argument of 1841 (155) being had again from the opposite direction.
The Atlas The Door