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Paladin's avatar

I was briefly (for about 15 minutes) caught up in the Sixties euphoria, as a tidal wave of utopian meddling by social justice lawyers washed over the nation's courts. At that time I was enamored and way too-eager to please a leftie psychologist (I'll call her Susie) whose amibtion in life was to empty the city's asylums and mental wards onto Chicago's streets. Susie's (and others') intention in that New Age of Enlightenment was, first, to liberate the mass of psychos, sociopaths and other mental sickos from from their "unjust" institutional confinement (and treatment) and then to merge that mass of sick humanity with the city's ubiquitous street gangs, at that time most dangerously its Blackstone Rangers, a massive criminal enterprise among inner city blacks hiding behind the DemocRat Party's delusion that they were not violent thugs but underprivileged victims of systemic racism, especially racial prejudice by law enforcement against POC's in Chicago. (Fifty years of such DemocRat Party political derangement led to the Summer of Love.)

Fast forward: At Susie's urging, I set up a volunteer legal aid clinic at one of Chicago's mental hospitals, with pro bono publicum office hours one night a week from 6-9 PM, advising patients and representing them in the exercise of their right to be crazy on city streets. My last two patients were 1) a man arrested and hospitalized after murdering his wife in her bed, fleeing his house with 4 small children, and driving aimlessly around his neighborhood in a snow storm until his car ran out of gas, and 2) a man fixated on Sun Times columnist Ann Landers, who was arrested for threatening Anne Landers and declared mentally unfit to stand trial. I interviewed the wife-killer and the guy fixated on Ann Landers, conferred with their psychiatrists and the police, came to the conclusion that they were both dangerously crazy, and decided that Chicago was safer and they were much better off by accepting the medical status quo, indefinite commitment to and treatment in the City's mental ward. Then, I closed my mental health legal aid clinic, moved away from Chicago, and watched for the next 25 years as smug, self righteous legal aid and ACLU lawyers emptied the nation's hospital beds of mentally ill patients. School shooters were just around the corner.

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Dale Flowers's avatar

I am old enough to remember the Happy Valley style funny farms. They were a common as the TB asylums of the 30s. Crazy people (not a pejorative back then) got help there when they needed it, either voluntarily or not. It was only when the do-gooder's in the 60s liberated them from compulsory treatment, often involving institutionalization, that the problem of homelessness, feces bespattered sidewalks and the Walking Dead became a problem. We gave them their freedom to reach their fullest potential and, by God, they did. The only upside is that the do gooders have to dodge the poop on the sidewalks and avoid ax attacks like the rest of us.

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