My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781477667538)

America started a grand experiment in the 1960s: deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The consequences were very destructive: homelessness; a degradation of urban life; increases in violent crime rates; increasing death rates for the mentally ill. My Brother Ron tells the story of deinstitutionalization from two points of view: what happened to the author's older brother, part of the first generation of those who became mentally ill after deinstitutionalization, and a detailed history of how and why America went down this path. My Brother Ron examines the multiple strands that came together to create the perfect storm that was deinstitutionalization: a well-meaning concern about the poor conditions of many state mental hospitals; a giddy optimism by the psychiatric profession in the ability of new drugs to cure the mentally ill; a rigid ideological approach to due process that ignored that the beneficiaries would end up starving to death or dying of exposure.

Author: Clayton E. Cramer
ISBN-10: 1477667539
ISBN-13: 9781477667538
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Language: English
Published: 06/28/2012
Pages: 260
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.78lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.55d