My experience at the Berkshire Medical Center may be as good as it ever got. In most of the country, deinstitutionalization was already a disaster: chronically ill people who had adapted to life in an institution were completely unprepared for life in the community, and the integrated supports they needed didn’t materialize. Community clinics, usually staffed by professionals interested in psychoanalysis for people with mild or moderate mental illness, were unwilling or unprepared to care for the people who had been hospitalized for years.
