Part of the problem is that it works like prison, where some of what makes it awful are crazy assholes ruining things for everyone else dialed up to 11.

The idea behind closing down the mental institutions in the 70s/80s (pursuant to a legal decision about the rights of the mentally ill) was that community-based mental health support should be offered instead. But of course, it never was. For yers mentally ill people were shoved into the prison system; that approach has been abandoned but they've mostly been left to rot on the street instead.

It’s a situation like congressmen who vote for a budget, the take a “principled” stand to block the debt limit. Or taking the Bill Clinton’s “fundamentally changing welfare forever”, by pushing recipients to Social Security Disabilty, and off of the federal and state government’s balance sheet.

In the case of mental hospitals, the closures were supposed to be replaced with community based care, but of course Medicaid and Medicare funding was not set to meet demand.

the doctors and knowledge wasn't bad, (a select few) people and biases were bad. That plus lack of due process to keep them in check lead to yet another form of discimination. The treatment of some high profile cases made a mental ward look worse than a prison.

I don't have a true answer to fixing all of this, but it should definitely be said that it WAS in fact bad. And that the fixtures are not technical in nature.