image credit: apbh2's Flickr account

Writing in SFGate yesterday, CW Nevius tells us that the "Rights of Mentally Ill Street People Thwart Efforts to Prevent Harm." Those pesky rights! What happened was that the "Sign Guy" of Justin Herman Plaza was arrested after attacking a police officer, when it was pretty clear that someone (the City? Men in white coats?) should have intervened sooner.

Let us be clear that this Sign Guy is not Frank Chu, who was sometimes known as "the Sign Guy" before his celebrity, and is still sometimes called that by ignorant tourists. This Sign Guy is Richard E. Jaworski, a prolific sign-maker who hung his neatly-lettered, sometimes hostile cardboard messages on trees, in sharp contrast to the peripatetic, polysyllabic, and highly professional style of Mr. Chu.

Apparently, one of Mr. Jaworski’s signs asked for help. CW Nevius is aghast:

So why didn't someone step in? Here was someone who was literally advertising for assistance. Why wasn't something done to remove this dangerous person from the streets?

The City is clearly negligent here! Unlike every other sign-holding homeless person in America, Jaworski was literally advertising for help!

Who's to blame, after the jump.

CW Nevius blames "the sixties":

…let's look again at Jaworski. He's clearly mentally ill, he's had violent run-ins with the police, and he had a warrant out for his arrest. Wouldn't he be a good candidate to be taken off the street?"

But where would we take them?" [Dr. Rajesh] Parekh [director of the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team] asks. "Where would that place be? We don't want to go back to the days of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' either. It used to be very easy to lock people up."

Those days, immortalized in Ken Kesey's "Cuckoo's Nest," ended in the '60s when mental health professionals became convinced that Thorazine and other drugs could treat schizophrenia and other mental conditions. They argued that locking people up in asylums was pointless and expensive.

That’s odd. When we arrived in California in the late 1980s, we heard a frequent refrain that the crowds of mentally ill homeless people had something to do with the policies of a fella named Ronald Reagan. So who should we blame for the Sign Guy’s plight? The freewheelin’ 1960s of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, or the cold-hearted conservatives of the yuppie 1980s?

In blaming the 1960s, Nevius must be talking about the Community Mental Health Center Construction Act of 1963, which was signed into law by JFK, and was a big part of the reforms of the 19th-century model of loony bins. OK, Dr. Parekh, we'll see your "Cuckoo's Nest" and raise you Sam Fuller’s 1963 funnyfarm-sploitation film Shock Corridor.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, officials at the local, state, and federal levels tried to coordinate access to and funding of the various kinds of mental health care available. These efforts, the record tells us, culminated in the National Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which was passed in the waning days of the Carter administration and repealed under Reagan in 1981.

The Gipper felt that anything combining the word "national" and "health" was a Communist plot. Here it is in his own words:

So gee, I guess maybe it isn’t the rights of the mentally ill that are the problem. It’s the dismantling of a public health policy that would serve them.

Here’s what the scholars have to say:

Health Affairs: A Policy Journal of the Health Sphere

The Electronic Journal of Sociology