I read the article in the Anchorage Daily News by Michelle Theriault Boots, “Woman attacked by stranger on street credits another stranger with saving her life.”
A number of years ago, I was standing on a street corner waiting to cross when a stranger on the other side of the street picked up a baseball-sized rock and threw it at me. I could have been seriously injured.
I am not going to try to diagnose the mental condition of individuals I don’t know. But I can point out history and the poor mental health treatment planning by the Legislature.
By 1962, psychiatric institutions opened their doors and started letting patients out, including at the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. But Alaska made no real plans of what to do with hard-to-place individuals with a mental illness.
In 1972, staff at API made the following statement: “The traditional hospital routine perpetuates the return to hospitalization.” The Department of Health and Social Services, with its plan of temporarily stabilizing psychiatric patients with psychotropic drugs and pushing patients out the door in five days, never learned the lessons from 58 years ago. And for that I blame the Alaska Legislature.
— Faith Myers
Anchorage
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