Taking care of mental illness

I have mentioned before how the liberals set into motion the root cause of today's homelessness epidemic (here, here,  and here).  Walter Williams at Frontpage Magazine covers this story in detail with links to further information:

GRAVE CONSEQUENCES OF THE DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION MOVEMENT
A liberal-created failure that goes entirely ignored is the left's harmful agenda for society's most vulnerable people — the mentally ill. Eastern State Hospital, built in 1773 in Williamsburg, Virginia, was the first public hospital in America for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Many more followed. Much of the motivation to build more mental institutions was to provide a remedy for the maltreatment of mentally ill people in our prisons. According to professor William Gronfein at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, by 1955 there were nearly 560,000 patients housed in state mental institutions across the nation. By 1977, the population of mental institutions had dropped to about 160,000 patients.

Starting in the 1970s, advocates for closing mental hospitals argued that because of the availability of new psychotropic drugs, people with mental illness could live among the rest of the population in an unrestrained natural setting. According to a 2013 Wall Street Journal article by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, titled "Fifty Years of Failing America's Mentally Ill" (http://tinyurl.com/y9l8ujww), shutting down mental hospitals didn't turn out the way advocates promised. Several studies summarized by the Treatment Advocacy Center show that untreated mentally ill are responsible for 10 percent of homicides (and a higher percentage of the mass killings). They are 20 percent of jail and prison inmates and more than 30 percent of the homeless.

Walter concludes with an observation that cuts to the heart of 99% of government problems:

Worst of all is the fact that the liberals who engineered the shutting down of mental institutions have never been held accountable for their folly.

Reminds me of this great quote:

Most of the problems of today are results of the solutions of yesterday.
Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired