Swept Under the Rug, and Forgotten.

TIKI-TOKI is a website that has a timeline of the history of mental institutions in the United States. In 1977, the mental institutions in the U.S could only take in a collective population of 160, 000 patients; and in 1982, budget cuts were being made and among those cuts were the services for the mentally ill. Although this took place in the United States, Clem’s memoir expresses the same struggle and concerns in Canada. Clem talks about the ‘Great Closing’ which was a time when services for the mentally ill were being cut. “Governments concluded that the large psychiatric institutions were counterproductive. These impersonal, ineffective, very expensive institutions would be terminated” (Clem 149). The recession in the eighties incentivized budget cuts further, and the “essential financing that was supposed to follow people with mental illness into the communities never did.” (Clem 151). Many people with untreated mental illness, as a result of the lack of services for those mentally ill, ended up homeless and as beggars. Clem links the number of people with mental illness on the streets to day “directly with the Great Closing of the Eighties.” (153). Clem emphasizes this time because it was a hard time for his family, especially for Liv, because he was not receiving the proper treatment he needed. Clem goes on to criticize the concept that people with mental illness will do better in an integrated community rather than an institution; saying how the community’s “sketchiest, most criminalized districts” (Clem 159) are the “area where those with mental health issues live.” (Clem 160). And this is due to the culture we live in, and how the problems such as mental illness are feared and swept under the rug. That today’s culture will isolate those with mental sickness, not taking the time to understand and help them. Instead our culture “won’t make room for those who are ailing from it and does everything possible to exclude them.” (Clem 157). Clem gives examples of this unjust, second class treatment of mental patients when he returns for Liv at the hospital in the morning. “I returned to the hospital. He was no longer in the lobby, but when I inquired at admissions, I was told he hadn’t yet received a room.” (Clem 207). After Clem had found Liv, he asks the nurse “whether she thought it was wise to place someone paranoid, delusional, and potentially suicidal off on his own.” (Clem 215). This just goes to show the negligence that people with mental illness receive. “As of Day Three my brother was still perched, untreated, unsupervised, in a hallway.” (Clem 217). The statement that Clem is making in this memoir is clear: that the people with mental illness are treated as second class patients, and they are not receiving the proper services they need. Society treats people with mental illness as something to be isolated and as something that can’t be understood, and so they are swept under the rug.