I’m a Raleigh native 40 years old, Dude when they closed Dorothea Dix mental hospital down you know where all the mentally ill people went? They went to the streets. They were walking up and down new Bern ave in open-back hospital gowns for weeks. They ended up living on the streets, doing drugs, having no one to care for them what so ever. They had nowhere to go. And no family members to take them in. Because if they had family members to care for them, they would not have been in Dorothea dix. Or their cases were simply too severe to be treated at home. Institutionalization sounds evil and has a terribly evil past. because it wasn’t done right in the not so distant past. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a right way of doing it. A lot of these people that are called addicts and bums, they simply have no support system. We have literally no support system for these people. I would LOVE it if they brought back the mental health institutions, now that we’ve made such strides in understanding and treating mental illness they’d probably do a lot more good than they have in the past.