ABSTRACT
Whereas the right to treatment was born in the early 1960s, its progenitor was the decades of parlous neglect of patients in America’s public psychiatric institutions through the mid-twentieth century. Kenneth Appel, MD, chairperson of the mental hospitals committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, proclaimed in 1947, ‘Automobiles get better attention than most mental patients today. The grass surrounding the state hospitals receives more care and consideration than the patients inside.’ (Deutsch 1948, p. 98) In his 1958 presidential address to the American Psychiatric Association, Harry Solomon indicated that ‘the large mental hospital is antiquated, outmoded, and rapidly becoming obsolete. We can build them but we cannot staff them … they are bankrupt beyond remedy.’ (Solomon 1958, p. 7).
