America started a grand experiment in the 1960s: deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The consequences were destructive: homelessness; a degradation of urban life; increases in violent crime rates; and 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 deinstitutionalization: a concern about the poor conditions of many state mental hospitals; an optimism by the psychiatric profession in the ability of new drugs to cure the mentally ill; and a rigid ideological approach to due process that ignored that the beneficiaries would end up starving to death or dying of exposure.
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