Teresa, I worked on the staff of a locked behavioral health facility and all of my colleagues had integrity, and the hospital was well maintained, had the latest equipment, and an excellent dining facility. We even won awards. But any place where people are locked up against their will cannot be a nice place or a very therapeutic place, and if you allowed the patients to leave most will walk right out that door. The fact that they are locked up with other mentally ill people is also not very helpful. A psychiatric hospital can only be a quiet place, and that can only be achieved by pumping the patients full of dope. Back before deinstitutionalization they were doing lobotomies, shock treatment, and spraying people with ice water to keep them quiet.

Norway has as many people as South Carolina, and incidentally a huge pile of money from their North Sea petroleum production. Hopefully whatever they are doing with the mentally ill works well for them, but it is not neccessarily going to work here at scale. In any case, no one is stopping states from trying it unless it involves committing a lot of people against their will. Norway is a capitalist country by the way, they just have a generous welfare state because of that oil money. They don't even belong to the EU because they don't want the regulations. Personally I don't understand people's obsession with Scandanavia.

Ronald Reagan is long dead, but the ACLU is still around and if an attempt is made to lock the homeless up in "hospitals" again, I think we can assume that they will try to stop it.

John