The Times has two really interesting pieces on mental illness running right now: this documentary, which is quite good, and Ron Susskind's piece on his autistic* son in the NYT Magazine.

The Susskind piece is more of a typical uplifting human interest story that you find frequently written about autism. It focuses on one [upper middle class] individual and that individual's story, without getting into too much depth on the real challenges.

The documentary shows the tip of the iceberg: what life is like for basically everyone else with serious disabilities. It's horrendous. Abuse and neglect come in many different forms, no matter which state you're in. Even some of the top programs for people with disabilities, which can be insanely expensive, are hard to distinguish from the type of untrained care described in the documentary. There is virtually no oversight or effective regulation and Medicare fraud is rampant.

Two pieces my father wrote speak to these topics:

Disability and the Invisible American 'Gulag Archipelago' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-s-greenspan/disability-an...

Failings in Mental Health Care for Adults With Autism http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-s-greenspan/health-care-a...

It's also interesting to look at the federal court records of county-level disabilities boards, such as the one in Cuyahoga County, OH, where I grew up:

http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/index.html?id=5006872

Not a pretty picture. And most communities are just as ignorant as the one portrayed in Iowa, if not more so.

* The word "autism" is virtually meaningless. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-s-greenspan/autism-concep....