Mr. MOYNIHAN: Mr. President, this past Friday (July 9, 1999),The Washington Post carried an excellent op-ed piece, "Deinstitutionalization Hasn't Worked," by E. Fuller Torrey and Mary T. Zdanowicz. The authors are the president and executive director, respectively, of the Treatment Advocacy Center. They write about the continued stigma attached to mental illness. They write about barriers to treatment. Most important, they write about the aftermaths of deinstitutionalization, and the seemingly horrific effects this policy has had.

In this morning's New York Times (July 12, 1999), Fox Butterfield writes about a Department of Justice report released yesterday which states that some 283,800 inmates in the nation's jails and prisons suffer from mental illness. (This is a conservative estimate.) As Butterfield puts it, ". . . jails and prisons have become the nation's new mental hospitals."

Over the past 45 years, we have emptied state mental hospitals, but we have not provided commensurate outpatient treatment. Increasingly, individuals with mental illnesses are left to fend for themselves on the streets, where they victimize others or, more frequently, are victimized themselves. Eventually, many wind up in prison, where the likelihood of treatment is nearly as remote.

This is a cautionary tale, instructive of what is possible and also what we ought to be aware of. I was in the Harriman administration in New York in the 1950s. Early in 1955, Harriman met with his new Commissioner of Mental Hygiene, Paul Hoch, who described the development of a tranquilizer derived from rauwolfia by Dr. Nathan S. Kline at what was then known as Rockland State Hospital (it is now the Rockland Psychiatric Center) in Orangeburg. The medication had been clinically tested and appeared to be an effective treatment of many patients. Dr. Hoch recommended that it be used system wide; Harriman found the money.

That same year Congress created a Joint Commission on Mental Health and Illness with a view to formulating ``comprehensive and realistic recommendations'' in this area which was then a matter of considerable public concern. Year after year the population of mental institutions grew; year after year new facilities had to be built. Ballot measures to approve the issuance of general obligation bonds for building the facilities appeared just about every election. Or so it seemed.

The discovery of tranquilizers was adventitious. Physicians were seeking cures for disorders they were just beginning to understand. Even a limited success made it possible to believe that the incidence of this particular range of disorders, which had seemingly required persons to be confined against their will or even awareness, could be greatly reduced. The Congressional Commission submitted its report in 1961; it was seen to propose a nationwide program of deinstitutionalization.

Late in 1961 President Kennedy appointed an interagency committee to prepare legislative recommendations based on the report. I represented Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg on this committee and drafted its final submission. This included the recommendation of the National Institute of Mental Health that 2,000 "community mental health centers" (one for every 100,000 people) be built by 1980. A buoyant Presidential Message to Congress followed early in 1963. "If we apply our medical knowledge and social insights fully," President Kennedy stated, "all but a small portion of the mentally ill can eventually achieve a wholesome and a constructive social adjustment." A "concerted national attack on mental disorders [was] now possible and practical." The President signed the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act on October 31, 1963 -- his last public bill signing ceremony. He gave me a pen.

The mental hospitals emptied out. The number of patients in state and county mental hospitals peaked in 1955 at 558,922 and has declined every year since then, to 61,722 in 1996. But we never came near to building the 2,000 community mental health centers. Only some 482 received Federal construction funds from 1963 to 1980. The next year, 1981, the program was folded into the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health block grant program, where it disappeared from view.

Even when centers were built, the results were hardly as hoped for. David Musto has noted that the planners had bet on improving national mental health "by improving the quality of general community life through expert knowledge [my emphasis], not merely by more effective treatment of the already ill." The problem was: there is no such knowledge. Nor is there. But the belief there was such knowledge took hold within sectors of the profession, which saw institutions as an unacceptable mode of social control. These activists subscribed to a redefining mode of their own, which they considered altruistic: mental patients were said to have been "labeled," and were not to be drugged. So as the Federal government turned to other matters, the mental institutions continued to release patients, essentially to fend for themselves. There was no connection made: we're quite capable of that in the public sphere. Professor Frederick F. Siegel of Cooper Union observed: ``in the great wave of moral deregulation that began in the mid-1960s, the poor and the insane were freed from the fetters of middle-class mores.'' Soon, the homeless appeared. Only to be defined as victims of an insufficient supply of affordable housing. No argument, no amount of evidence has yet affected that fixed ideological view.