Are we there yet? Where? Are we ready to do more than lament, that yes, maybe, mental health is a problem? We say it is, but we never give up the ghost. With only 42% of the vote, in 1981, former Governor Ronald Reagan moved into the White House and not so gently escorted Community Mental Health Centers out. President Reagan and the Republicans erased any evidence of the Mental Health Systems Act passed under his predecessor Jimmy Carter and CMHC funds were block granted to the states. Out of sight out of mind – this is the mindset that enmeshes our society. Guns, conceal them. Conversations on the subject – shelve them. Change a law. Consider a regulation. Perhaps we are as he. “Ronald Reagan was a product of the Southern California culture that associated psychiatry with Communism.” You think not? Hollywood is not Southern California, or possibly it is. Shoot ’em up – stab them or jab them. Bang! You’re hit, a box office hit!

But we digress. Consider this. In California, by the 1950s mental health institutions were filled to the rafters, or so said cost-conscious policy makers. Physicians, philanthropists, legislators and the people clung to the belief that drugs were the dream, the cure for all mental illness. Buy the bluster. Pop the pills; embrace encouraging projections frequently fortified by misinformation, and you too can suspend skepticism. Ronald Reagan did and today, we are he. When Ronald Reagan became governor of the Golden State in 1967, he continued to do as was already being done during the Edmund G. Brown Senior years. He emptied mental health facilities. The difference is, by 1984 Mr. Brown, the Senior, expressed regret about the way the policy started and ultimately evolved. ”They’ve gone far, too far, in letting people out,” ‘Pat ‘Brown said in an interview.

Dr. Robert H. Felix, who was then director of the National Institute of Mental Health and a major figure in the shift to community centers, says now

[in 1984] on reflection: ”Many of those patients who left the state hospitals never should have done so. We psychiatrists saw too much of the old snake pit, saw too many people who shouldn’t have been there and we overreacted. The result is not what we intended, and perhaps we didn’t ask the questions that should have been asked when developing a new concept, but psychiatrists are human, too, and we tried our damnedest.”

Dr. John A. Talbott, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said, ”The psychiatrists involved in the policy making at that time certainly oversold community treatment….” He said the policies ”were based partly on wishful thinking, partly on the enormousness of the problem and the lack of a silver bullet to resolve it, then as now.”

The original policy changes were backed by scores of national professional and philanthropic organizations and several hundred people prominent in medicine, academia and politics.

Tis the money; it is true, and politics too. The question is, after another year of daily shootings, followed by talk of today’s mental health silver bullets, are we sick and tired of being sick and tired? Has hiding from the comprehensive conversation about guns, helped? We want to be happy; after all it is the holiday season, but the truth is that good cheer might make it worse. Family? Friends? How do we face them knowing that we have timidly stood by tacitly giving permission to the many massacres on our streets and in our schools? How do we face ourselves, and the numbers?

We have been down so long that it looks like up. Stick ’em up – shut ’em up – no talk of guns. Bang! You’re it! Without you we will never get there. We will never be able to move beyond the bullets and bull-sheets. Our children will be covered in white cloth, and carried out in pine boxes.

Reference and Resources…