Yes,please- more mental institutions !

  Thank you, Robert Whitcomb , for your very sane column today on a very urgent issue: the need for more and better mental hospitals  in the United States. How many families have been hurt or ruined by our clearly dysfunctional mental health care system ?  You can find a whole shelf- full of books on the failure of de-institutionalization-written by compassionate and competent mental health professionals- in any public library. Alas, some of these books were published three or four decades ago.

            Deep depression is also a form of " madness ". In his popular book on the subject, " Darkness Visible ", William Styron explains how at a certain stage in his illness nothing was more beneficial to him than a long stay in a decent mental institution.

     Above all, the mentally ill have a right to recovery. And they can best recover far removed from the competitive, capitalist- almost Darwinian- " struggle for existence ".

          No doubt I will soon be reading more stories in the newspapers about tragic crackups who " fell through the cracks " of our otherwise outstanding  mental health care system. So much too for the " right of citizens not to be imperiled by crazy people walking around... "