When US government-run hospitals were accused of violating human rights, advocates pushed for deinstitutionalization: the replacement of federal mental hospitals for community mental health services. The closure of state-provisioned psychiatric hospitals was enforced by the Community Mental Health Centers Act in 1963 that laid out terms in which only patients who posed an imminent danger to others or themselves could be admitted into state facilities.[29] This was seen as an improvement from previous conditions. However, there remains a debate on the conditions of these community resources.
It has been proven that this transition was beneficial for many patients: there was an increase in overall satisfaction, a better quality of life, and more friendships between patients all at an affordable cost. This proved to be true only in the circumstance that treatment facilities that had enough funding for staff and equipment as well as proper management.[30] However, this idea is a polarizing issue. Critics of deinstitutionalization argue that poor living conditions prevailed, patients were lonely, and they did not acquire proper medical care in these treatment homes.[31] Additionally, patients that were moved from state psychiatric care to nursing and residential homes had deficits in crucial aspects of their treatment. Some cases result in the shift of care from health workers to patients' families, where they do not have the proper funding or medical expertise to give proper care.[31] On the other hand, patients that are treated in community mental health centers lack sufficient cancer testing, vaccinations, or otherwise regular medical check-ups.[31]
Other critics of state deinstitutionalization argue that this was simply a transition to "transinstitutionalization", or the idea that prisons and state-provisioned hospitals are interdependent. In other words, patients become inmates. This draws on the Penrose Hypothesis of 1939, which theorized that there was an inverse relationship between prisons' population size and the number of psychiatric hospital beds.[32] This means that populations that require psychiatric mental care will transition between institutions, which in this case, includes state psychiatric hospitals and criminal justice systems. Thus, a decrease in available psychiatric hospital beds occurred at the same time as an increase in inmates.[32] Although some are skeptical that this is due to other external factors, others will reason this conclusion to a lack of empathy for the mentally ill. There is no argument in the social stigmatization of those with mental illnesses, they have been widely marginalized and discriminated against in society.[21] In this source, researchers analyze how most compensation prisoners (detainees who are unable or unwilling to pay a fine for petty crimes) are unemployed, homeless, and with an extraordinarily high degree of mental illnesses and substance use disorders.[32] Compensation prisoners then lose prospective job opportunities, face social marginalization, and lack access to resocialization programs, which ultimately facilitate reoffending.[32] The research sheds light on how the mentally ill—and in this case, the poor—are further punished for certain circumstances that are beyond their control, and that this is a vicious cycle that repeats itself. Thus, prisons embody another state-provisioned mental hospital.
Families of patients, advocates, and mental health professionals still call for the increase in more well-structured community facilities and treatment programs with a higher quality of long-term inpatient resources and care. With this more structured environment, the United States will continue with more access to mental health care and an increase in the overall treatment of the mentally ill.
However, there is still a lack of studies for mental health conditions (MHCs) to raise awareness, knowledge development, and attitude of seeking medical treatment for MHCs in Bangladesh. People in rural areas often seek treatment from the traditional healers and MHCs are sometimes considered a spiritual matter.[33]