Fair enough, but the ACLU has removed any chance of discussion due to their insistence on litigating issues with no regard to the consequences or plan in place to deal with costs associated with the ruling:
"More recently, Olson observed, “we’ve gone through some incredible assertions of psychiatric supremacy into various parts of life. This has extended to handing down rules for how life should be ordered–including, obviously, for those among the mentally ill who were institutionalized. Those institutions where psychiatry was given great power–all the way up to the power to hold people against their will–provided reformers and critics [with procedures and processes] to question, as they began to take a hard look at what one might call ‘the empire of psychiatry.’ [The reformers were particularly concerned about] the rights of people who were swept into that empire’s power, so to speak,” through the practice of institutionalizing the mentally ill.
In the 1960s, Olson said, political and media attention began to focus more and more on various high-profile examples of certain abusive practices within institutions supposedly serving the mentally ill. Olson observed that some reform-minded critics of those institutions began to warm to the idea of public interest lawyers and law firms taking up the cause of institutionalized patients. “The people inside institutions were not necessarily in a position to speak for their own interests, and their relatives could not always be relied on speak for them,” Olson said. Public interest law firms like the ACLU, could fill the gap.
As this view took hold, the flurry of litigation in the 1970s proceeded, some of it funded by McConnell Clark and much of it involving the ACLU. “And now look where we end up,” Olson noted. “The temptations of power entice the public interest lawyers to call for the old institutions for the mentally ill to be closed down–but without considering whether this is the best outcome for everyone.”
“Yes, some [formerly institutionalized] people may be better off around family, but others may be afforded a higher quality of life through an institution.” Olson added that he himself feels “philosophically torn” on this point, and cautioned that no one side in the institutionalization versus de-institutionalization debate necessarily has all the answers.
One result of the 1970s litigation, Olson said, is that “public interest lawyers have taken on a kind of inspection role over institutions for the mentally ill, but without being subject to any of the accountability that a government agency would face. We would not have designed this system on purpose, because it means that the inspection power has become in a way unaccountable, placed as it is in hands of the public interest lawyers. A formal inspection-based system, in contrast, would be subject to various oversight measures, including freedom of information requests, calls from legislators for the inspection agency head to testify about the agency’s record of findings, etc.” These checks and balances don’t exist where the public interest bar is concerned."