NYAPRS Note: In this opinion article, New York OMH’s Chief Medical officer Dr. Lloyd Sederer strips the romanticism from the easy solution of bringing back asylums to deal with our structurally deficient mental health system. Claiming “It didn’t work then. It won’t work now”, Dr. Sederer highlights community and family inclusion as a basic competency we all want to take part in, emphasizing the need to invest in the supports that make that possible. An excerpt from the article is below, but see the link to read the whole piece.
No Asylum for Asylums
US news; Dr. Lloyd Sederer, 5/20/2015
“Romanticizing the asylum, when done by a prominent health care expert like Emanuel, risks diverting attention and vital resources (i.e. money) from the current, mounting efforts to build an adequate community mental health system, which has yet to happen in the wake of the 1963 Community Mental Health Act, signed into law by John F. Kennedy. We also need to develop alternatives to institutionalization for people (including incarceration) with mental disorders and to increase the supply of community housing, rather than warehousing the mentally ill in hospitals, nursing homes and adult homes. Let’s be real – there is not sufficient new or additional money to build a responsible and responsive community based mental health system, but we might succeed by repurposing some of the huge sums we now spend on institutional care to finally realize the vision of the Community Mental Health Act.”