Social implications of deinstitutionalization

Attacks on custodialism offered the hope of more humane treatment approaches. Mental health planners thought that the costs of state hospital care could be reduced by discharging patients into the community. For state governments, this involved a shift of costs and responsibility to the federal government. This shift was accompanied by an increase in cost‐effective planning at both state and federal levels. Cost‐effective planning uses corporate‐style standardization techniques to provide precise, measured types of treatment to certain categories of patients. Such planning is primarily oriented to balanced ledgers of the government budget, rather than meeting specific human needs. The shift in costs also increases profits in the private sector. This is most noticeable in the nursing and boarding home industry where entrepreneurs derive large returns from a new custodialism mainly funded by government reimbursements. The institutional overuse of psychiatric drugs is continued in community programs. Costeffective approaches also involve firing mental health staff and increasing the workload of those remaining. Community mental health centers and state hospital deinstitutionalization programs have largely failed to meet most of their promises such as noninstitutional treatment, more humane care, prevention, and rehabilitation. These failures have produced the beginning of a delegitimation of the new mental health approaches. This delegitimation is also used as part of more general attacks on social services so prevalent in this period of economic crisis. This reinforces the reliance on cost‐effective plans which do not benefit clients. It also poses the danger of increasing the number of persons classified as psychological misfits among the marginal underclass. Even though this is an unintended effect, it can then be used to deflect onto these victims popular resentment against big business and the government. Further, the growth of such a misfit group, along with other types of social decay, may prompt an increase in the already growing forms of social control psychotechnology such as psychosurgery.