Quotes About Deinstitutionalization

Institutionalization is not, however, an irreversible process, despite the fact that institutions, once formed, have a tendency to persist.49 For a variety of historical reasons, the scope of institutionalized actions may diminish; deinstitutionalization may take place in certain areas of social life.50 For example, the private sphere that has emerged in modern industrial society is considerably deinstitutionalized as compared to the public sphere.51 A

The breakdown of the wall separating marriage from nonmarriage has been described by some legal historians and sociologists as the deinstitutionalization or delegalization of marriage or even, with a French twist, as demariage. I like historian Nancy Cott's observation that it is akin to what happened in Europe and America when legislators disestablished their state religion.

Having deinstitutionalized mental health, we have not created the structure and the institutions to take care of people, to identify when there is a mental health problem, and to get the treatment to people.

Treatments are very limited, and deinstitutionalization has resulted in increased homelessness and incarceration for this population. In many ways, deinstitutionalization is a crime against humanity: There is no other disease in which needed inpatient care is denied for political reasons.

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications.

In 1955, at their peak, American mental hospitals held 560,000 patients nationwide, double the number at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1988, three decades later, that figure had fallen to 120,000.

The costs of not being integrated correctly (and I am using corrections here deliberately) are the veiled threats and often realities of institutionalization or returning to segregated congregate living (for those who were deinstitutionalized). There is always the shadow of the adverse consequences if one does not conform or comply—what I called elsewhere the institution yet to come.46 The specter of incarceration is inherent, as a promise or threat, in mechanisms of liberal inclusion.

In Disability Servitude, Ruthie-Marie Beckwith shows that one of the major economic causes of accelerated deinstitutionalization was ending the practice of unpaid forced labor in these institutions. This practice, based on lawsuits and enforcing fair labor laws within disability carceral spaces, meant that the cost of maintaining institutions increased after the 1970s.

A growing industry of privately run nursing homes and board and care facilities began to emerge with the phase-out of the hospitals and in some cases gained a lobby that advocated proactively for closure in order to increase their profits, leading to the modern-day institutional and deinstitutional industrial complex.

But in the hegemonic story of deinstitutionalization, psych drugs were seen as a factor only in the field of mental health and are almost never discussed in the origin story of deinstitutionalization in the field of I/DD. In other words, the use of Thorazine and other psych drugs in I/DD institutions is not perceived as leading to their closure, even though they were widely used.

I argue that deinstitutionalization is not just something that has "happened" but was a call for an ideological shift in the way we react to difference among us.

of the Shadows, a powerful exposé that documented how deinstitutionalization and failed government policies had created a "mental health crisis" in America.

In the same decades that saw the rise of mass incarceration, the number of beds available in state mental hospitals across the country dropped from 339 beds per 100,000 people in 1955 to under 20 beds per 100,000 people by 2015. There are now ten times as many mentally ill people in our prisons and jails as there are in state mental institutions.