Stephan:   In the early 1970s the Nixon Administration closed most of the Federal mental health facilities, and encouraged states to do likewise. It was largely a Big Pharma scam. The sales pitch was that these facilities, some of which were awful it is true, particularly in the South, but some of which were excellent caregivers, would be replaced by outpatient clinics using the new "wonder" drugs in psychiatry. However, the money was never authorized to build the outpatient clinics and, then, the drugs turned out to be significantly less effective than claimed. The result of this heartless fraud was that tens of thousands of mental patients were dumped onto the streets where many became homeless, and many more were arrested and sent to prison. Almost 50 years later the net-net of this venal stupidity is that the American gulag has become the de facto mental healthcare system for hundreds of thousands of impoverished mentally ill men, women, and children. It is a national shame as this report spells out. As it says, "At least 400,000 inmates currently behind bars in the United States suffer from some type of mental illness—a population larger than the cities of Cleveland, New Orleans, or St. Louis."