I just read in the LA TIMES that the first of four dams on the West’s Klamath River was destroyed. By the end of 2024 all four will be gone from the California-Oregon border and the massive runs of salmon and steelhead along 400 miles of waterway will be restored. In fact, more than 1600 American dams have been removed since 1912, from California to Connecticut.
So what? you might be thinking. Why is a retired shrink writing about dams? Well, I was lying on the couch in my living room, obviously not the psychiatric one in my former office, when I got really angry. Damn it! How many mistakes have our elected officials made that created chaos and misery?
In LA in the forties and fifties and sixties, it was cheaper to use buses than the existing trolley cars. It would have cost tons of money to upgrade the old rail system. The politicians didn’t have the foresight to predict that an investment in what we already had would be wise. Now we’re playing catch-up with all the other major cities in the world and spending many billions to build a subway and extend a light-rail system.
How about The Community Mental Health debacle? In the sixties, the pitch was that we’d save billions by closing state hospitals, and the mentally ill wouldn’t have to live in the disgusting state hospitals that looked and felt like prisons. I was a great advocate of the new system. In fact, when I started my psychiatric practice near Philly, I worked in a mental health center. It was wonderful. We did home visits and saw the same people who had been locked up in Byberry State Hospital and Philadelphia General Hospital in a homey, pleasant atmosphere. Then the politicians decided to use the mental health money for dozens of other things. Mental health centers closed and the mentally ill became street people, living in tents, urinating and defecating where they lived, and attacking people when voices told them to defend themselves. Predictable? Of course.
Think of the myriad of other mistakes our country made: the Viet Nam War, invading Iraq after 911, being addicted to fossil fuel, allowing everyone to own and carry firearms, the red scare in the sixties and on and on.
Don’t dam it, until someone with perspective examines it. We all need to look beneath the obvious and not blindly follow our leaders.
Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to check out my new books, PATIENT X and LITTLE ITALY. Best Wishes, Art
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Inside The Mind of a Psychiatrist 