Mental facilities are expensive on budgets. They have been low-key closing them across the US and just dumping the patients in the streets as homeless. In my current state they are pushing back on that trend and building group homes of 4-5 people with small care facilities to watch over them. Newly build places that look unassuming. From the little I know of any data recorded on this project it seems to be working.
Mental hospitals have had a very bad history all over the world. Living conditions and atrocities have been the norm. So to avoid media and lawsuits and just to cut moneypit costs they are closing them down when they get old and simply not providing any replacements.
How The Loss Of U.S. Psychiatric Hospitals Led To A Mental Health Crisis
It`s truly sad and maddening at the same time. I can`t comment on the state of the situation in the USA as you can but here in Canada, while the government does a reasonable job, it`s still well below the standard of care they could be offering those with mental health and addiction issues.
What`s been sweeping across the country is the harm reduction model where the "goal" is to decrease the amount an addict/alcoholic uses in the course of the day. Organizations who embrace the HR model get more funding and it`s based on statistics.
I am no doctor but am intimately familiar with addiction and I was asked to speak at a local college in Halifax on addiction and I had a bit of heated discussion with one of the most ignorant MLA`s (Member of Legislative Assembly) who couldn`t stop beating her drum at how much of a success one program was having with the harm reduction model.
She used an example of one alcoholic who had drastically decreased her drinking from over 16 drinks a day down to about 10 a day. I said that while it`s never going to be a negative thing if someone manages to drink less, the bottom line is this, 10 drinks is still 10 drinks and I asked her a question to which she had absolutely no answer. I asked what was she drinking when she was consuming 16 beverages or more a day? Was she drinking 16 beers or glasses of wine or what have you? I then asked what is she drinking now? I too "technically" cut down on the number of beverages I consumed near the end of my drinking, the problem was, I shifted from beer and/or wine to pounding doubles of scotch into my guts so did I really benefit from "reducing harm"?
Anyways, I was irate when I left but at the end of the day, my experience as a clean and sober person for 14+ years is this, we can have all of the absolute top notch programs in the world, we can pour endless amounts of money into those programs, if the addict or person themselves are not willing/able to bring themselves to accepting that help, they likely won`t get better.
I was part of the PI (Public Information) team in Halifax , asked often to speak to teachers(and students), doctors about addiction and the questions I was asked and/or the responses I received when I asked them a question about their knowledge in the area of addictions were appalling.
Somewhere on my computer I still have a list of 20 government funded programs that money was/is being poured into that are absolutely ridiculous which I`ll try to find, there was one study that cost the taxpayers over 5 million dollars as the government issued a study to find if we needed to change the background color of roadside signs.....and that was one of the stronger studies, sickening