Asylum: (noun) somewhat old-fashioned : an institution providing care and protection to needy individuals (such as the infirm or destitute) and especially the mentally ill.

— Merriam-Webster online

Not long ago I called my oldest friends back in Oklahoma to catch up on things. During the course of the conversation he told me something disturbing and I think I will have to go and see for myself sometime soon.

Norman, Oklahoma is where Oklahoma University is located, and the state mental hospital. Local legend has it the territorial government agreed to locate the state university there, but they had to take the mental hospital as well.

I imagine any proposal to build a mental hospital in any town in America would probably encounter a lot of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard!) but we were used to it, and it was never a problem. In fact it was a great student job where you could live cheap in the employee dorm and eat in the cafeteria that fed both patients and staff.

When I lived there the town had precisely two homeless people, whose names we all knew.

Well apparently there is now a tent city of homeless people after a young mayor was elected whose overflowing compassion allowed – or encouraged it to happen. She’s gone now but the problem remains.

This is the story of a number of cities across the country, particularly in California where the climate makes living rough year-round easy. Thousands of homeless, many mentally ill and chemically addicted, make life difficult and dangerous for ordinary citizens.

This is not a case of old geezers lamenting days gone by. There have always been skid rows inhabited by the down and out, the alkies, and the crazies — but not in such numbers.

What happened?

I came across some numbers recently comparing civil commitments in the 1970s and now. The stats are not fully reliable but at least show orders of magnitude. Back then there were more than half a million long-term commitments nationwide. Today the figure is in the low-to-mid tens of thousands.

What happened was a fad for something we called “de-institutionalizing,” based on the notion that putting people in institutions was itself making them unable to cope with life on the outside, and they should be given treatment and released as soon as possible.

The fact it meant we could cut funding that had no effective constituency was a bonus.

We were wrong. Horribly, tragically wrong.

This was at least partly based on the claims of controversial psychiatrist Tomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness, and The Manufacture of Madness. Szasz was an opponent of involuntary mental hospitalization and claimed “illness” was an inappropriate metaphor for what he called “problems with living.”

But Szasz himself opposed de-institutionalizing. He said these people are not “crazy” in any meaningful sense but simply among those unfortunates born into every generation who simply can’t cope. That a humane society will house them in reasonable comfort to live out their lives.

Three hots and a cot – and drugs. Back then we had Thorazine, which causes tardive dyskinesia after prolonged use, what we used to call the “Thorazine shuffle.”

But we’ve got better drugs now to blunt the edge of the pain of reality. And we’ve found if we don’t provide something for those who need it they’ll self-medicate with nasty deadly stuff like heroin and Fentanyl.

This is not the first time our attempts to be compassionate have misfired and undoubtedly not the last. We need to acknowledge the experiment failed and bring back asylums.

— Steve Browne is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent