There is a difference when you are homeless because you"re bankrupt, you have no job, no where to look to, and because everyone that you have known has abandoned you, and homeless, simply because you have a psychotic illness that cannot be controlled and has to be treated because the illness could be a threat to your life or to the people that come in contact with you. The difference between these two types of homeless people is that one type has a choice and the other doesn't. The homeless person that is bankrupt and has no job can always turn his life around and try to start from somewhere to get his life back in control, but what the homeless person with the psychotic illness do? Obviously they can't just say, Ok I"m all better now, let me get my life back together, no, they would need some serious psychiatric treatment to turn their life around. But how do they come to the conclusion that they need psychiatric treatment? Or better yet why is this person who has a serious psychotic illness living on the streets without any supervision? The answer is deinstitutionalization, which Paul S. Appelbaum talks about in his essay Crazy in the Streets. Appelbaum talks about how deinstitutionalization came about and how the wrong approach was taken, how it affected communities, and how the mental patients coped with living in a sane area. This paper will give you a summary of Crazy in the Streets and my opinions and evaluations about all that is written in Appelbaum's essay.
Deinstitutionalization was an experiment involving the release of about 800,000 mental patients. This idea was very well liked by liberals and conservatives because by decreasing the state mental hospitals by over 50% mental patients were receiving their freedom, and also because of the large amount of money that would be saved by cutting the mental health budget. Before the concept of deinstitutionalization however, .
