Sadly, most were just prisons by another name, and beatings were also heavily featured.

Group homes and supervised living are still a possibility for you. Discuss it with your social worker or even your parole officer. There are still plenty of options for what you are looking for but they aren’t often forced by the courts like what you’re thinking of when you think asylum.

Mental asylums as they existed in the US before the 80s were often little more than glorified prisons. They did all kinds of horrific things to people which today we would consider torture.

That said, most people (not all, but most) who were in mental asylums were there because they had very real issues they needed real treatment for. Most people were not getting the treatment they needed, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t need something.

The mental asylums absolutely needed a lot of reform. Most probably did need to be shut down, or, at the very least, the entire staff needed to change and they needed a completely new philosophy of care. What this country absolutely did NOT need is to just throw all those people out onto the streets to fend for themselves. It seems to have been a lateral change for the people who needed help and a negative change for the rest of the country.

I’m not sure I would use the term “mental asylum” as that has a lot of cultural connotations I don’t think we need or want to bother with. However, I do think the federal government should provide massive amounts of block grant funding to states to open new facilities which can provide inpatient services to people who suffer with mental health problems. These should be founded on a care-first framework, not the torture prisons of yore.

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