This initial post to this blog will introduce the reader to what this blog will be mostly addressing: the ongoing crisis in the United State’s mental health treatment system. I as a psychiatrist started tracking this slow motion crisis in the 1980’s when the state of Massachusetts uinderwent a number of changes under the then new and catchy codephrase of the future” mental health reform. It began with statewide changes in mental health funding; while lauded, it resulted in such disastrous funding for mental health services that one of the then medical school psychiatric departments, Tufts Medical School, had to sell off its child psychiatry service to Harvard to survive and continue to operate. Then the state of Michigan under the then Governor, Republican John Engler, whose approach foreshadowed the cut mental health funding approaches of the future in his multi-term tenure as governor slashed the state’s mental health system, closed state hospitals and reduced state hospital psychiatric beds by over 50%, and privatized the system in short order, throwing the system into chaos. Continue reading →