MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Among President Jimmy Carter's list of accomplishments is a piece of landmark legislation that was passed but never realized. It remains an important milestone in national policy around mental health. NPR's Katia Riddle reports.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: Let us journey back for a few moments to the 1960s. A movement was taking hold around the rights of patients - an idea that people with significant mental health disorders should not be held captive in hospitals. Keith Humphreys studies health policy at Stanford University.
KEITH HUMPHREYS: So there's fewer and fewer state mental hospitals, fewer beds in general hospitals, and fewer and fewer psychiatric hospitals. So this has an effect as you get into the '70s, which is there are more and more people with serious mental illness who are out on the street and are being noticed.
RIDDLE: The country rallied around the idea that people with mental health illnesses also have human rights, but there was no consensus on how to help them. Enter Jimmy Carter. He introduced something called the Mental Health Systems Act. The idea was to fund community health centers all over the country that would support this population.
HUMPHREYS: So now, reaching down into communities around the country, the federal government would build and support, in the long term, community mental health centers all over, and they would help take care of people who had serious mental illness as well as other types of psychiatric disorders.
RIDDLE: Carter had a rocky relationship with Congress. But still, he got the act passed. It was 1980. Months later, Reagan was elected. He dismantled the legislation. But Humphreys says Jimmy Carter introduced the country to a radical proposition with the Mental Health Systems Act - one that was ahead of its time.
HUMPHREYS: That taking care of our fellow citizens who have conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and major depression is as important a national priority as taking care of people who have cancer, taking care of the elderly, taking care of people who have heart disease.
RIDDLE: Though some of President Carter's ideas have been realized in the decades since, much of the work is still unfinished.
Katia Riddle, NPR News.
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