John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier acceptance speech paved the way to the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. This law provided federal funding for community based programs to replace the centralized psychiatric care model, which we recognize as the constellation of state hospitals.
From The Republican
By Katherine B. Wilson
March 17, 2013
John F. Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act is worth remembering
JFK delivering New Frontier speech at DNC national convention 1960. Image care of JFK Presidential Library.Fifty years ago this year in a speech to Congress, President John F. Kennedy proposed “a national mental health program to assist in the inauguration of a wholly new emphasis and approach to care for the mentally ill.” Central to a new mental health program is comprehensive community care.
Later that year in 1963, Congress passed the Community Mental Health Act to provide federal funding for community mental health centers and research facilities devoted to research in and treatment of mental retardation. It was the last legislation President Kennedy signed into law before his assassination.
In Western Massachusetts, the Mental Health Consortium, a partnership of several health and mental organizations, was the recipient of federal funding under this legislation. It arrived in the Valley at the same time that Massachusetts began the closing of Northampton State Hospital.
This NIMH funding, along with funding from the Massachusetts’ budget, developed the foundation for the community mental health system in Western Massachusetts. For people in Springfield with mental illness, JFK’s final legislation ended the nightmare of being “warehoused” in secluded hospitals and forgotten institutions.
The law opened the door to a new era of recovery and the hope of moving back into their communities. Since then organizations like Behavioral Health Network have been helping people recover from mental illness and live full lives.
Twelve days after Jared Lee Loughner shot his way into the American psyche outside a Tuscon, Ariz., grocery store on Jan. 8, a 25-year-old mental health counselor in Revere was kidnapped from a group home and savagely killed, allegedly by one of her clients. Nine days later, it happened again when a homeless 19-year-old with a history of mental problems reportedly stabbed a shelter worker to death in Lowell, just 30 miles away.
No one can say for sure whether either murder had anything to do with funding cutbacks that have decimated the state’s mental health budget, but on the front lines in the war on mental illness, counselors are concerned.
“If you have one woman (counselor) and five men with mental health problems, it screams to me of mental health cuts,” Barry Sanders, a social worker for more than 20 years, says of the group home north of Boston where Stephanie Moulton was working when she was kidnapped and killed on January 20. “Having these kinds of staffing levels is like playing the odds, rolling the dice with someone’s life.”
Across Massachusetts, mental health agencies are feeling the strain of cutbacks that have ripped nearly $85 million from the state’s Department of Mental Health budget since 2009.
“It’s been devastation. Complete and utter destruction and devastation. The entire mental health system is shredded,says Laurie Martinelli, executive director with the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a mental health advocacy and research group.
Massachusetts Department of Mental Health Commissioner Barbara Leadholm takes a more diplomatic stance.
