When states shutter long‑stay psychiatric hospitals without adequately funding community alternatives, care burden shifts to emergency rooms, shelters, and the criminal‑justice system—producing a durable policy externality that raises costs, concentrates vulnerability, and fragments care continuity. Policymakers must treat institutional capacity as a governance lever: closures require matched, audited community investments and legal safeguards to prevent cycling into jails and homelessness.
— This reframes deinstitutionalization as an institutional design failure with cross‑sector implications for housing, policing, and health spending rather than a purely therapeutic or civil‑rights milestone.
2026.12.08
78% relevant
The article links closing state psychiatric beds to an ongoing mental‑illness crisis and the downstream effects of removing bed capacity—precisely the causal pathway that the existing idea identifies (hospital capacity cuts shifting burden onto jails, shelters, ERs).
2026.01.05
100% relevant
Willowbrook exposé and the post‑WWII policy shifts (National Mental Health Act, NIMH funding) described in the article illustrate the historical pathway that closed institutions without scaled community capacity and set up the later transfers to shelters and prisons.
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