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It is sad we don't have a safety net any longer - we used to have asylums now we have homeless people who are mostly mentally ill in some fashion or another.

I'm not sure how I'd cope if I had a relative with a similar situation. Thanks for sharing your story.

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Asylums are better than homelessness, but to go as far as saying they are "safety net" is a stretch. They were usually not designed to help, but to put away. Then again, I'm not american and whenever I come to the US I'm amazed by how many homeless people one see in the streets.

There are people that we cannot help with current medical technology. Letting them live somewhere safe, with people who can care for them, is probably better than most of the alternatives - homelessness and prison.

Sadly, asylums have a long history of abusing patients. Very few societies are willing to pay the cost of caring for the severely irreversibly ill.

Exactly the problem. Long term care would be ideal for some persons. There's no "mental health lobby" like the prison industrials to encourage mass expenditures. And we certainly wouldn't want the prison megacorps to run our inpatient facilities.

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