https://www.city-journal.org/mentally-ill-ada
As the death of George H. W. Bush brought admiring attention to the Americans with Disability Act, which he had signed into law, the New York Times detailed how mental health advocates have weaponized the ADA to force hospitals and adult homes to discharge mentally ill patients still in need of significant care. The result of these discharges has been increased degradation, death, homelessness, and incarceration among the mentally ill whom the advocates purport to represent.
The Times told the story of Abraham Clemente, a schizophrenia sufferer formerly housed in an adult home—a residence where mentally ill can get intensive care, in environments less restrictive than psychiatric hospitals—who was discharged in 2017 as a result of an ADA consent decree that New York State signed under pressure from civil-liberties advocates. The agreement, as the Times described it, “is meant to be a national model for the rights of the mentally ill to live independently.” Frontline’s cameras were rolling this year, when police found the 69-year-old Clemente living in his apartment with “maggot-infested scrambled eggs . . . strewn across the floor”; a cantaloupe “so spoiled, it seemed to be melting,” and feces “ground into the carpet.”
After being hospitalized, Clemente was readmitted to an adult home, and says he doesn’t want to leave. The Times detailed another mentally ill victim, a 34-year-old former adult-home resident also moved to independent living after the ADA consent decree. She “stopped taking her antipsychotic drug and began trying to solicit sex from passing drivers and swap alcohol for drugs with neighborhood children. . . . Eventually, facing eviction, she became homeless.”
Civil liberties and mental health advocates believe that institutional living is axiomatically bad, and independent living is definitively good, regardless of the severity of the mental illness and the limitations it imposes on the person suffering from it. In its 1999 Olmstead v. L. C. decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the ADA requires states to place people with mental disabilities in the “least restrictive settings . . . appropriate to the individual . . . taking into account the resources available.” (Emphasis in original.)