Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is

Stephen I. He's been on the show before. He's a City Journal contributing editor, a senior fellow at the

Manhattan Institute, and the author of a brand new book called Homelessness in America, which has been

published by Roman and Littlefield. He also has a new report due out this week from the Manhattan Institute, co-authored with

an adjunct fellow, Carolyn Gorman, and it's called The Continuum of Care, a Vision for Mental

Health Reform.

So Steve, as always, thanks very much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me, Brian.

This new report, which I'd like to

talk about, does not propose a single nationwide system for mental health care in America,

but it does sketch a kind of structure that communities can adopt. So what is the continuum of care that you're referring to? Well, we're trying with this

report to kind of take seriously the idea of a community-based system of mental health care.

This has been the ideal in mental health care policy debate going back many decades when we

decided to phase out the old asylum

system.

But we've always come very short of that ideal.

And even though there seems to be ever more interest in mental health, that debate, the

coverage of mental health just continues to have this just very vague character.

And so with this report, we're trying to give a little bit more focus and just concreteness as to what exactly a community-based system with

mental health care with real integrity would look like. So most people would be living in the

community in accord with the ideal.

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