Heh, we were sending out those guys with white coats and nets until you mentioned the antibiotics... 😉
When New York started a wholesale closing down of psychiatric institutions, life in NYC certainly got more interesting. The problem, of course was that while civil liberties advocates saw this one way, the states mostly saw it as a boon to their budgeting woes. Therefore, for those formerly institutionalized as having assorted categories of mental illness, being free also pretty much meant being abandoned to streets and so eventually to jails or prisons. I was in my 20s at the time and living in Manhattan, and for only a little while, blissfully unaware of that flip side while thinking the reforms were all to the good.
But then came that day when I merely smiled at this little old lady on Amsterdam Avenue while I was on the way to the laundromat; we had made eye contact and her face and eye color in particular had reminded me a bit of my grandmother, hence my smile. As I say though, we had made eye contact... and she instantly went off the deep end, apparently feeling threatened by that level of intimacy, and so she tried to attack me, to the point I had to seek safety in a nearby shop. And, I had to find a new route to the laundromat, because she remembered me... -- and she was tough enough and scary enough still to be on the streets for quite awhile after that.
It was one of those growing-up experiences, those times when one realizes there are ideals and then there are realities: one of the ideals is personal freedom and one of the realities is that with freedom can come the complete inability to manage it safely or with personal responsibility. Not to politicize this thread on that thorny issue, but just sayin' that my experience with that woman was a huge revelation to someone only a couple years out of that bubble with a bunch of other college students pretty sure we knew how to change the world. World, maybe, since anyone can burn down a barn... but changing how the world tends to work is not all that simple, and on the matter of closing the asylums and refusing to pony up for better alternatives, well we're all still paying big time for that.
On a lighter note, I found my DVD of March of the Penguins! Just in time lol, the first snowfall of the season here that had managed to stick has now managed to dissipate, and I'd rather see vistas of snow and ice than bedraggled brown lawns that just got burnt by 10ºF overnights the last couple days.
Ah,
@LizKat, yes, that story is fascinating.
Something similar occurred in what was then Czechoslovakia, after the fall of communism, but re prisons not mental asylums.
Precisely because so many of the dissidents who came to power after The Fall Of The Wall had spent some time in prison (often, on trumped up charges), like liberal students (and mea culpa, this, too, was also me at one time - it took me some time to digest the necessary lesson that not everyone behind bars is there wrongly or has been a victim of socio-economic misfortune), there was a view in certain circles that Prison Was A Bad Thing, and the jails full to bursting of the unjustly and wrongly incarcerated.
So, with freedom, came a vast emptying of prisons; meanwhile, the police, (still stuffed full of old style apparatchiks) lodged (polite) protests in vain.
Almost overnight, the crime rate soared; historically, communist countries - because, frankly, most were some version of a police state complete with vast numbers of reasonably well remunerated (for the society in question) police officers - tended to have very low rates of crime.
In Czechoslovakia (as it then was), the new (liberal, post-communist, freedom loving democratic) government was at a bit of a loss to understand what was happening and why this was happening; the old (still more or less communist) police force, between gritted teeth, were compelled to explain that not everyone behind bars had been an unjustly convicted dissident, that some had been genuine criminals, and others were so viciously violent that it was a requirement of public safety that they be locked up.
A chastened government arrived at the conclusion that even functioning democracies required a prison system, if only to try to keep the streets safe for the rest of the population.
Yes,
@LizKat: Agreed. There are ideals and there are realities, and where they intersect can be a bit of a steep learning curve: This sort of sometimes lapsed liberal arrived at that conclusion, a bit belatedly, too.
Re penguins, and the lovely movie The March of the Penguins, I don't go to the cinema all that often (maybe once a year, at most), but, the year it was released, I did take my mother to see The March of the Penguins, and we both loved it.