Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

138 LABOR, POVERTY AND SCHIZOPHRENIATable 6.1 Differences in rehabilitative and reintegrative efforts for the mentally ill during thedepression and the boomA fairly recent example further illustrates how psychiatric philosophy is moldedby the politics of the period. In 1981, as part of a nationwide trend towardsbudgetary cuts in human services, the City and County of Denver, Colorado,sharply reduced its allocation to Denver General Hospital. The administrators ofthe community mental health center, which formed a part of the hospital,responded by drastically cutting their services to their most severely disturbedclients—money-losing outreach services to hundreds of exstate hospital clients inboarding homes, including a day-care program, alternative supportive housing,sheltered employment and vocational training. A number of these chronically illclients brought a class action suit against the hospital and its funding agencies,demanding reinstatement of these essential services. The psychiatrists andadministrators of the mental health center entered the following defense: therewas no evidence to show that the type of community services they had beenproviding to the chronic psychotic patients were at all effective. 28 Their view wasincorrect, 29 but this is incidental. The point of interest here is that less than adecade earlier the Colorado state legislators had been assured that suchcommunity-treatment methods were so superior that the state hospitals could berun down and the funds diverted to community mental health centers. Frombuoyant optimism to the depths of pessimism in less than ten years—from