Title: Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse
Headings: Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse
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Content: They called for a federal takeover. Congressional advocates frequently invoked the US government’s Manhattan Project as inspiration. If America could build a nuclear bomb in a few years, why couldn’t we prevent and cure mental illness? As Congress debated mental health reform in 1946, some were suspicious. “ Men get strange ideas,” said Republican congressman Clarence J. Brown of Ohio. “ They decide the only way in the world they are going to solve all the problems of mankind is to do a certain thing and that their field is the most important.” Many reformers believed mental illness was created by poverty and inequality and argued that solving it required creating “mentally healthy” environments, organizing tenants, and fighting landlords. These reformers viewed mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as socially constructed and not the result of biology, as most doctors believe today. They sought clinics that would “promote health” and “the development of a resilient character.” They wanted clinics to treat the “totality of [a patient’s] being in the totality of his relationships.”