The History of Housing for those with Disabilities, A Retrospective

Housing people with disabilities didn't change that much from 1796 until the early 1980's. A grand movement began in the early 1970's for people with developmental disabilities. The movement was inspired by Robert Kennedy visiting Willow Brook "State School" in Staten Island. He said it was not fit for animals. Then in 1972 Geraldo Rivera gained entry to Willow Brook using a stolen key and documented the brutal and horrific living conditions of its disabled residents (http://www.nysarc.org/news-info/nysarc-news-view-story-detail.asp?varID=128, http://www.nndb.com/people/308/000022242/). The report ignited advocacy across the nation and deinstitutionalization began. From the mid 70's through the mid 1980's people with developmental disabilities were transferred from institutions to group homes, foster care, and private settings. The institutions that held them were closed down. Michigan was one of the great leader states for this revolution and many other states soon followed.

The successful revolution for people with developmental disabilities pioneered deinstitutionalization of people with Mental Illness. The introduction of private hospitals and public hospitals and the use of a wide variety of pharmaceuticals used to stabilize patients helped to support this second wave of deinstitutionalization.
At first, there was a lot of bouncing back and forth from living in group homes and family settings to rebounding back into the short stay hospitals. Electroshock therapy and frontal lobotomies were still used widely across the nation as late at the 1980's.
It wasn't until the early 1990's that a drastic change was made in housing for people with mental illness. Most of the large insane asylums have been were closed down except for a few for the housing of the criminally insane.

Group homes and transitional housing, foster cares, and room and boards picked up a large portion of the people with mental illness exiting these institutions. Unfortunately, many of people with mental illness have become homelessness and have been put into jails and prisons. In 2007, 25% of the people in our Michigan prison system have mental illness, making the prison system the single biggest housing agent for people with mental illness. There are people and initiatives beginning to address this problem. Jail Diversion is diverting patients away from jail stays and placing them into hospitals for treatment and social work. The Michigan Prisoner Re-entry Program is working to help people leaving prison on parole have success in the community by meeting their needs, including mental health supports, short term housing funds, and vocational training.

To truly understand how far we have come, it is important to look at the beginnings of the reform movement, as illustrated in the following passage:

A visitor to the "mad wards" of Pennsylvania Hospital at the turn of the nineteenth century would have found the halls astir with an air of reform. A few years earlier, in 1796 to be exact, the lunatics had been moved from unheated, dingy cells in the basement, where they had often slept on straw and been confined in chains, to a new wing, where their rooms were above ground. Here the winter chill was broken by a coal fired stove and occasionally the mad patients could even take a warm bath. Most important of all they now began to receive regular medical treatments a regimen of care, physician Benjamin Rush proudly told the Pennsylvania Hospital overseers, that had lately been discovered to be effectual in treating their disorder. Hospitals were just being built in the year 1751 first by the Quakers in Pennsylvania to replace these places of horror.

Rush was constantly championing liberal, humanitarian reforms. He had been a member of the continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He'd advocated for the abolition of slavery and prison reform. At his request, the hospital's governing board built a new wing for the insane patients, which was completed in 1796, and soon many patients were enjoying the comforts of rooms furnished with hair mattresses and feather beds.
But such humanitarian care lasted for just a short time before influences from European mad doctors interceded. The Europeans had developed a diverse array of therapeutics for curing madness, and Rush, eager to make Pennsylvania Hospital a place of modern medicine, employed their methods with great vigor. The housing of the mentally insane was generally hospital based usually with no hope of ever leaving alive. Fear was a tactic used by the Doctors and staff to control mentally ill patients. The conditions were draconian and insidious, cruel, unjust and inhumane.

Excerpt taken from "Mad in America" by Robert Whitaker, copy write 2002

Community Housing Network assists people with developmental disabilities mental illness find and keeps affordable housing in their communities. The housing resource center people in their search for affordable housing, learn good tenant and neighbor skills, and use public subsidies as needed.

(1) "Mad In America " Written by Robert Whitaker, copy write 2002