Questions

When people talk about mental hospitals they always talk about how much better they were in the past. They say that now most psych wards are like dorms while in the past mental hospitals were like prisons. But while mental hospitals in the 30s may have resembled prison, over the 40s they got better and reached their zenith in the 1950s and the largest psychiatric facility ever constructed was the Pilgrim psychiatric center that housed 13,000+ patients and while parts of it resembled prisons, those portions were only for the most violent patients. As patients got better and better they would get to the sections that were less and less restrictive. And they had things like arts and crafts, activities and they would even tend gardens outside. And do you know how much it cost to build it? 25% of the NYC state budget O_O Could you imagine the US spending 25% of its budget to help the mentally ill? Now many people argue that we don't need such excessive hospital systems because now we have psychiatric drugs to treat people with mental illnesses. While it did attenuate the need for psychiatric hospitals, I can't help but think we overshot and put too much faith in medicine as the graph below shows.

Now you may say that mental hospitals now a days don't resemble prisons like the ones in the past, forget winding up in a place that resembles a prison, many people who were driven to criminal behavior by their mental illnesses actually end up in prison. Either that or they are homeless.