Dreams and Suitcases

In addition to what was written below, I can confirm that no one is forced to stay at the Willard Drug Treatment Facility. They are given the choice of completing the military style boot camp/drug rehab or serve a sentence posed by a judge for violating their parole. Do not judge, but I have known someone who completed WDT and it changed his life dramatically and he has not been in trouble since. Please note that this is a success story on all sides. Yes, it is sad that the mentally ill were treated that badly, and were barbarically put through treatments that did not work; however, thank goodness alot of how the mentally ill has changed and the center being used to further rehab convicted drug users only further proves that progress continues with both issues: the treatment of the mentally ill and the convicted.

To the last comments... i dont think the person who wrote this ment they keep the drug addicts and parolees there for good( the end of the article)... its a half way house.

Willard is no longer a psychiatric center, but a drug treatment center, run by the New York State Department of Correctional Services. The current program is for convicted criminals who have violated their parole and is time limited. No one is warehousing these inmates or ruining their lives any more than they have done so to themselves already. They have a chance to stop the irresponsible behaviors and to avoid further prison time and the program itself is geared towards rehabilitation and change, not to permanently lock up the participants. Get your facts straight.

I found the end of this article to be incredibly ironic. The tone of the article overall is self-congratulatory: aren't we so much more enlightened now than we used to be, since we don't forcibly warehouse most mentally ill patients anymore? Then, I read that the facility now "houses drug-abusing parolees . . . ." So, forcibly warehousing and ruining the lives of mentally ill persons who don't harm others is unacceptable, but doing the same thing to persons who use mind-altering substances (aside from alcohol) who don't harm others is okay? (If a person--either a mentally ill person or a drug user--poses an actual identifiable threat to others, that is a different story. Most mentally ill persons and drug users don't fall into that category.) Hopefully, at some point in the future the "War on Drugs" will be looked upon as an embarassment, much in the same way we now look back upon these outdated mental institutions.