Mental Health Best Practices over the years

San Francisco Homeless Person
CC Jean Stimmell: 1/2/17

Quote from Guernica on evolution of mental health practices:

"Even so, not unlike the shackles it replaced, this invention too would gradually fall out of fashion—as would, in turn, forced lobotomies, and sensory deprivation, and fever therapy, and induced insulin comas, and then the entire creaking, crumbling institutional edifice altogether, until finally, thankfully, we arrived at the neurocentric, non-invasive, psychopharmacological moment in which we find ourselves today.

"It’s a moment characterized, among other things, by the increasing offshoring of clinical drug trials; by the transformation of jails and homeless shelters into warehouses for the mentally ill; and by the sovereign omnipresence of the DSM. It’s a moment that has expunged, in rhetoric if not in practice, any trace of the older prerogatives of imposition and control from its therapeutic lexicon. 

"What’s left? Those familiar and taken for granted terms—community care, best practices, clients and consumers instead of patients, and on and on—that now comprise such an established part of mental health care in the global North."*

* quote from essay entitled "Chains" by Brian Goldstone in Guernica:

    https://www.guernicamag.com/chains/