Hi everyone, it's Beth here for a quick primer on mental health services in the United States.

I want to thank Debbie Cohen, one of our regular listeners. Debbie has a PhD in Teacher's Social Work

students in Texas. She is frequently someone who provides us with great insight and data and she

prepared the notes for this primer so that we could share some background in advance of our

discussion on Tuesday about how mental health is currently being addressed in our communities.

So I want to go back to the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 and the purpose of going this far back

in time is just to say that the roots of mental health services are in dealing with poverty and you

can see that trend continue all the way through the present day. So under the 1601 Poor Law, the

Poor were divided into a couple of different categories. The law referred to the impotent poor,

people who couldn't work and were labeled as either lame, impotent, old or blind. Those folks were

given relief in something like an Almshouse or a poor house. There was another category of people

called the Abel-Bottied Poor who were sent to work in what is referred to as a House of Industry.

And then the third category was the Idol Poor and Vagrants who were sent to a House of Correction

or even a prison. Poor children would become apprentices and so depending on the person and how

the person was viewed, some individuals with mental illnesses were treated as impotent poor,

some were treated as idol poor, but the care or institutionalization provided under the law dealt

with these folks only because of their economic circumstances. As people migrated across the

pond to the United States, so came along the concept of Asylums and in the mid-1800s, Dorothy

started discovering that mentally ill people and Massachusetts were jailed alongside criminals,

denied clothing, left and unlit and unheated and windowless rooms, and over a 40-year period,

she crusaded on behalf of the mentally ill. Her work resulted in 32 state hospitals being

established as Asylums. Another trend that you'll see along with dealing with poverty and

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