TEXT C The mental health movement
in the United States began with a period of considerable enlightenment. Dorothea
Dix was shocked to find the mentally ill in jails and almshouses and crusaded
for the establishment of asylums in which people could receive humane care in
hospital-like environments and treatment which might help restore them to
sanity. By the mid 1800s, 20 states had established asylums, but during the late
1800s and early 1900s, in the face of economic depression, legislatures were
unable to appropriate sufficient funds for decent care. Asylums became
overcrowded and prison-like. Additionally, patients were more resistant to
treatment than the pioneers in the mental health field had anticipated, and
security and restraint were needed to protect patients and others. Mental
institutions became frightening and depressing places in which the rights of
patients were all but forgotten. These conditions continued
until after World War 1I. At that time, new treatments were discovered for some
major mental illnesses theretofore considered untreatable (penicillin for
syphilis of the brain and insulin treatment for schizophrenia and depressions),
and a succession of books, motion pictures, and newspaper exposes called
attention to the plight of the mentally iii. Improvements were made, and Dr,
David Vail’s Humane Practices Program is a beacon for today. But changes were
slow in coming until the early 1960s. At that time, the Civil Rights Movement
led lawyers to investigate America’s prisons, which were disproportionately
populated by blacks, and they in turn followed prisoners into the only
institutions that were worse than the prisons the hospitals for the criminally
insane. The prisons were filled with angry young men who, encouraged by legal
support, were quick to demand their rights. The hospitals for the criminally
insane, by contrast, were populated with people who were considered "crazy" and
who were often kept obediently in their place through the use of severe bodily
restraints and large doses of major tranquilizers. The young cadre of public
interest lawyers liked their role in the mental hospitals. The lawyers found a
population that was both passive and easy to champion. These were, after all,
people who, unlike criminals, had done nothing wrong. And in many states, they
were being kept in horrendous institutions, an injustice, which once exposed,
was bound to shock the public and, particularly, the judicial
conscience. Judicial interventions have had some definite
positive effects, but there is growing awareness that courts cannot provide the
standards and the review mechanisms that assure good patient care. The details
of providing day-to-day care simply cannot be mandated by a court, so it is time
to take from the courts the responsibility for delivery of mental health care
and assurance of patient rights and return it to the state mental health
administrators to whom the mandate was originally given. Though it is a
difficult task, administrators must undertake to write rules and standards and
to provide the training and surveillance to assure that treatment is given and
patient rights are respected. It can be inferred from the passage that, had the Civil Rights movement not prompted an investigation of prison conditions, ______.
A．states would never have established asylums for the mentally ill B．new treatments for major mental illness would have likely remained untested C．the Civil Rights movement in America would have been politically ineffective D．conditions in mental hospitals might have escaped judicial scrutiny