Bad Science, Sentimentality and Mental Illness

In the 1950s and the 1960s, psychiatrists, sociologists and artists began to criticize the institutionalization of the mentally ill. Mental hospitals, they argued, were oppressive and cruel. Soon, thousands of people were liberated - often onto the streets, where they died, as the American psychiatrist Darrold Treffart put it, with their rights on.

To be…