Essay On Mental Health Care System

America’s broken mental health care system has been a controversial topic for nearly two hundred years. It affects not only the mentally ill, but also their families and their communities. The evolution of the health care system leaves America currently with a system that is not serving the needs of her patients; instead, the organization’s close-minded philosophy leaves a majority of the mentally ill homeless or in prison, provides inadequate care for the few people who are lucky enough to secure a bed in an inpatient facility, and poses a threat to the people of America by letting the untreated mentally ill walk freely in society. Mental health care in America began in the 1800s with Dorothea Dix’s activism that eventually led to the establishment of over 100 psychiatric asylums in the United States (“A Brief History of Mental Illness and the U.S. Mental Health Care System”). Today, the word “asylum” has a bad …show more content…
These asylums provided professional treatment in a peaceful environment, often large buildings with beautiful architecture and pleasure gardens where the patients could enjoy their free time. They functioned normally for about twenty years before poor funding and an overflow of patients led to overcrowding and reprehensible conditions. The development of antipsychotic drugs and alternative treatments, such as electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomies in the 1900s, led to America’s second mental health reform, mental hygiene and psychopathic hospitals. These new treatments were often abused, used as punishment for unruly patients instead of the intensive therapeutic care they required. Most of these treatments are now seen as primitive and unethical and are no longer practiced, which led to the third mental health reform, deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization was put into place in the 1980s and is largely to blame for today’s broken mental health care system.