A Terrifying Picture
Read (beg, borrow or steal) the Opinion piece in yesterdays [4-23-07] Wall Street Journal (my favorite newspaper) by Jonathan Kellerman called Bedlam revisited . (subscription) It's dynamite. And it has an absolutely terrifying illustration by David Klein. I was moved to write a letter to the editor about it. Of course the odds of getting a letter published in the WSJ are pretty skinny. The nice thing about having a blog, is that I can publish my letter! So here 'tis... Letter to The Editor The biggest question raised by Jonathan Kellerman’s powerful “Bedlam Revisited” is this: Can our country reverse a truly monumental mistake? When “institutionalization” morphed into “community psychology” in a few short years, and we quickly developed the witches brew of mass homelessness as Kellerman notes, and prisons full of psychotics, there was not so much as a “woops” from the political class. Huge mistake? What mistake? We had several recent instances here in Albuquerque in w...