Thursday, December 4th, 2008
Oh, sure…It’s all in your head…
Texas lambasted over care of mentally disabled
Justice Department accuses state of violating patients’ constitutional rightsDENTON, Texas - For more than a century, thousands of mentally disabled Americans were isolated from society, sometimes for life, by being confined to huge public hospitals.
In at least one place, they still are.
Texas has more mentally disabled patients in institutions than any other state, and the federal government has concluded that the state’s care system is stubbornly out of step with modern mental health practices.
I think I can hazard a guess as to why this is the case. Texas is run by a cabal of crooked conservatives, and conservatives tend to view mental illness as “junk science” made up by special interest grievance-mongers — that is, unless they can get some demagogic mileage out of it. Thus, they’ll fight tooth-and-nail against increased protections for mentally ill criminal defendants, while peddling lies about post-abortion depression or dismissing any dissent out-of-hand as “Bush Derangement Syndrome” or writing books labeling the political persuasion of half of the electorate as a “mental disorder.”
And you wonder why I had to take a mental health break back in September.
