A new piece by Kylie M. Smith in the Journal of Southern History will interest AHP readers: “No Medical Justification: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama’s Psychiatric Hospitals, 1952–1972.” No Abstract. Paragraph one:

IN OCTOBER 1963, PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY SIGNED INTO LAW the Mental Retardation and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act (also known as the Community Mental Health Act, or CMHA), which required states to downsize their existing, overcrowded psychiatric hospitals and offered new federal funds for the construction of community-based centers. To qualify, each state was required to submit a Comprehensive Mental Health Plan. The author of the Alabama plan, the newly hired state health officer Dr. Ira Lee Myers, made a number of frank admissions. “The anti-federalism, the crippling preoccupation with race, the defensiveness inflamed by defeat, poverty and resentment of the efforts to change the people’s value system,” he wrote, “have flared again.” In addition to the baleful influence of those he called “anti–mental health extremists,” Myers claimed that “[t]hese attitudes have not only slowed our state’s progress in the quantity and quality of mental health services, training and research, but have cast a shadow over the planning process itself. Reluctance to accept federal funds and resistance to the concept of planning had to be overcome before the actual job of organizing to plan and study could begin.”