This is fallacious. The push against forced deinstitutionalization was made because of the systematic abuse within that system. The role of any modern society is to offer people who need it treatment and basic support (and that should include housing, of course), without impeding their basic human rights.
>The push against forced deinstitutionalization was made because of the systematic abuse within that system.
That is a quintessential example of "throw baby with bathwater". You've replaced regulated institutions staffed with credentialed professionals (medical and otherwise) providing safe and structured environment and healthcare, with mentally ill people living in tent-cities and squalor, surrounded by crime, prostitution, abuse and illegal drugs and exposed to the elements.
Tell me again how you've guaranteed 'basic human rights' with your replacement for institutional care? And don't tell me that any problems in the 60s and 70s with institutional care, could not and would not have been improved over time. Instead, the policy to dismantle state and municipal institutional care destroyed countless lives that would have benefited from said care.
>The role of any modern society is to offer people who need it treatment and basic support (and that should include housing, of course), without impeding their basic human rights.
And people who aren't capable of making the best decisions for their lives due to mental illness - how does that factor to your equation of 'basic human rights'?
Again, this is redirection. Mentally ill people squatting in tents is not a problem everywhere, only in places where nothing was done to replace the asylums, and where people were just abandoned in the streets. Better social programs were created in most places, like supervised housing, regular social worker visits, "Housing First", etc. Putting people in what is in many ways worse than a prison, for the "crime" of suffering a mental illness, was not right, and most developed countries actually chose to improve the existing system instead of just "throwing the baby with bathwater". If the place where you live is full of mentally ill people living in the streets, the solution is not to return to the system that existed before, but to create a better system to replace it.
