TY - JOUR PY - 2015// TI - Policies and consequences: how America and psychiatry took the detour to Erewhon JO - Psychiatric services A1 - Becker, Robert E. SP - 1097 EP - 1100 VL - 66 IS - 10 N2 - In the mid-1960s, federal legislation provided psychiatry with funds for construction and initial staffing of local community mental health programs and funded university psychiatry departments to support research, innovations, and education in social-community psychiatry. Psychiatry gained resources for treating diseases and for addressing the disabilities that accompany mental illnesses. Abrupt losses of federal funding in the following decades, combined with restrictive insurance reimbursements and the expanding influence of the pharmaceutical industry, undermined psychiatry's abilities to address the needs of persons with severe mental illness. The author describes the perverse shift in social priorities that has occurred-with persons who have chronic mental illness housed in jails and heightened public perceptions that mass murders are the acts of persons with mental illness.

Language: en

LA - en SN - 1075-2730 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201400485 ID - ref1 ER -