Kansas' treatment of those with mental illness was a 'study in neglect' decades ago

America has a long history of criminalizing mental illness.

Well into the 20th century, courts, not clinicians, committed people with mental disorders to state hospitals, where too often they were warehoused and received little if any meaningful treatment.

A report written in 1948 for the Kansas Board of Health titled “A Study in Neglect” concluded that “a seriously mentally ill person (in Kansas) is almost a criminal before the law.”

The report — written by Harry Levinson, a psychologist of national stature who began his career at the Menninger Clinic, and two colleagues — also noted that more than one-third of the approximately 46,000 Kansans who had entered state mental health hospitals between 1866 and 1946 had died in them.

Read more: http://cjonline.com/news/2016-10-22/kansas-treatment-those-mental-illness-was-study-neglect-decades-ago