Beware of reformers. Enthusiastic activists often dismiss weighty arguments on the other side and propose cures that end up being worse than the disease. So it was with the drive to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill. Certainly, there were abuses. Certainly, there were people involuntarily committed who shouldn't have been. But the Cuckoo's Nest crusade took it much too far. "Apparently drafted by the law firm of Frank Kafka and Lewis Carroll, the laws on the mentally ill that have emanated from the deinstitutionalization era are both absurd and tragic." (Torrey, Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally Ill (1988) pp. 29-30.) Homelessness is often the result of vesting the choice not to be treated in people whose illness makes them incapable of making an intelligent choice. The American Psychiatric Association task force called this "cloak[ing] neglect in the banner of freedom." (Lamb, et al., Summary and Recommendations, in Treating the Homeless Mentally Ill: A Task Force Report of the American Psychiatric Association (Lamb et al, eds. 1992) p. 3.)

But homelessness is not the only, or the worst, result of these misguided policies. In Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Bernstein and Nathal Koppel have this story: