OBVIOUSLY, PILLS ALONE ARE NOT THE ANSWER.

Pills cannot teach. Pills cannot listen or speak. Pills cannot comfort. Pills cannot re-socialize. Pills simply address the symptoms of mental disorders, which may have biochemical and/or developmental causes. 

The hordes of mentally dysfunctional human beings on the streets and in shelters in America are victims. They are victims of parents who knowingly or unknowingly passed on predilection for addiction or mental illness. They are victims of their own brains. They are victims of the selfishness of a society which does not wish to help them beyond medicating them. 

Most are not hapless victims. Mental disorders do not necessarily incapacitate brain or body totally. Those pills are an effective method of addressing acute symptoms long enough to seek the true remedy. That remedy is rehabilitation, which simply means retooling daily habits.

This is where American society fails miserably. The availability of rehabilitating environments for the truly dysfunctional have decreased as their population has increased. Libertarian attitudes have crept into the realm of people care. This is interesting, since the patron saint of American Libertarians is Ayn Rand, herself a sadomasochist who emotionally tortured and alienated those in her personal life who offered her affection and commitment. 

Caring for people who have hereditary or developmental mental problems is not a profitable business. It will most likely never be one. So, Libertarians are doomed to be far from compassionate in this area from the start. Unless, of course, you convince yourself that profitable pharmacology, boutique non-profits and private prisons are the answer.

Why would we expect anything else from those who believe that profiting from war at the taxpayers' expense is OK while providing universal health care to those same taxpayers is bad? 

A free society which must allow women to make the choice whether or not to procreate must also accept that a predictable percentage of offspring born into that society will be physically and/or mentally impaired in some way. Traditional state-funded systems for caring for mentally ill patients were overwhelmed by Baby Boomers, many of whom were damaged by the Vietnam War and the drug culture of the 1960's and 1970's. 

Subsequently, the enabling of single motherhood with increased welfare benefits, complicated by steadily increasing alcohol and drug abuse in the poorest communities, stressed government medical support systems to the max. Pharmacology was heralded as the solution. Medicate and discharge. I worked in this system in the mid-1970's. Psychiatric care was re-labelled "Community Mental Health". 

Community Mental Health was basically a way to push mental dysfunction back into the poor neighborhoods which were the largest sources of mental and social dysfunction. Rather than removing the mentally dysfunctional to a remote location away from the environments which shaped their dysfunction, the "experts" decided to carry out a massive experiment based on seemingly miraculous pill therapy. 

Today's tent cities and huge prison populations, a majority of which must be medicated to maintain control of themselves, are the ignored results of that massive experiment which failed miserably. 

Rather than somehow magically rallying to cure the mentally ill denizens of their poor neighborhoods, inhabitants of poor communities suffered from increasing violence, drug addiction and gangster culture. The functional fled or withdrew from civic life to protect themselves. Drug gangs replaced law and order. They also replaced family structure. 

Today's wave of migration by traumatized people from poor countries is a second blow to the society's mental well being. I believe today's bizarre political culture is a symptom of the unaddressed mental health issues in America. Television ads for prescription drugs are commonplace. Yet the quality of civic life is hardly improving.

The general emotional state of the society is deteriorating into tribalism, isolation and fear, easily exploited by media. People drive everywhere. They stare at their phones in public places. Spontaneous socializing in public spaces has dwindled. Threatening protests become social vehicles. Mass killings increase. Marijuana stores become legal. Liquor stores and bars have booming business. 

This may all be a stage of a long-range societal correction, as the more hopeful capitalists preach. After all, tent cities and prisons may be a way of lessening the gene pool of the dysfunctional. Suicide and drug overdoses as well. This hard-knocks solution may eventually yield a generally prosperous and functional society. It hasn't worked before, but technology's influence on society may provide the added ingredient. Those into tech may dream this, but why do they also try to become the world's censors and spies for the more totalitarian?  

There may be a tipping point before that more gradual correction. If the amount of dysfunction in society becomes sufficiently extreme, the result could be the violent chaos which has ripped through societies throughout human history. Progress and regression have been constant counterpoints of human development, individually and socially. From where I sit, we are in a socially regressive trough, despite all the marvels of technology which enable the individual who can use them.