I discovered how my family’s struggles were eerily intertwined with pivotal moments in the history of America’s fractured mental health system. We Kissingers had come of age just as failed federal reforms were ushering hundreds of thousands of the sickest patients out of institutions and onto the streets. In the name of civil liberty, we traded one outrage—the warehousing of our sickest psychiatric patients in conditions unfit for animals—for another, deserting them to suffer alone.
