Sage Rat so, by “person with a mental illness” you’re only talking about people who are so unwell that they are going to stab themselves with forks or get lost in public spaces. Glad we cleared that up.
Your original post wasn’t exactly clear there.
What sort of person did you think I meant when I indicated a need for one to four caretakers each taking a significant amount of their day out to tend to this one person? 
I assumed you meant a treatment resistant schizophrenic with severe functional impairment.
However, you used the much vaguer term “person with mental illness” which implied that everyone with any severe form of mental illlness needs constant care in an institution and is also worthless to society.
Well are we talking about addicts or more classicly mentally ill people?
I think what many high functioning mentally ill (ones who can function in the community and who advocated for the closure of insistutions) activists missed is that, while there are a lot of people who CAN and do function in the community, there are folks who cannot take care of themselves at all.
We need a contimun of placements, from totally in the community, to special hospitals.
There’s no one size fits all…but mandating residental hoisptial placements/ mental health community placements would shrink the chronic homeless population A LOT.
And since when does “best practice” mean “option that seems less costly short-term but will lead to situations that will be a lot costlier to fix”? Oh wait…
Anyway, that’s a problem with misusing language, not with psychiatry.
I think in many countries the situation is changing for the better; for example, more and more people accept that, if you have an official diagnosis of “wrong inna head” (with more medical language), you’re to be expected to occasionally act strangely. Same as there are ThisIsNotThePit who abuse Downies but most people understand that someone with that peculiar appearance is liable to need help reading complicated documents or to start hugging people in the supermarket because “y’all looked sad!”, most people are getting to the point where they accept someone can be ill without looking ill; this isn’t good only for people with mental illnesses but also for people with non-visible conditions ranging from dyslexia to MS.
At the same time, the official situation sometimes goes through wild swings: at one point the Spanish government decided it was “undemocratic” to have inpatient psychiatric hospitals and closed all of them :smack: this led to situations like patients without family finding themselves homeless. Creating communal houses and so forth took years, during which the most-needy patients were in their own piece of Hell. The smart ones would do things like try to get themselves arrested for minor crimes or hospitalized for physical issues; some hospitals would admit a few for short stays so long as the beds weren’t needed by someone whose kidney stones hadn’t come from a river bed, but remember: if the patient was in for “kidney stones”, he wouldn’t be in a psychiatric ward… oh wait, those had been closed!
A girl who spent her high school years growing up in Argentina with whom I took a German class told me that one of her favorite aspects of Argentinian culture in particular is the positive attitudes towards mental health. Most people go to a therapist at some point, and it’s accepted as a normal behavior towards getting well. Insurance is legally mandated to respect the need for mental care as equal to that of physical.
I don’t know how much of it she was right about and how much was idealizing, as she was a communist after all.
Oh, Bipolar as well, hence her knowledge of the attitudes towards mental health in the US. Bipolar Austrian Communist from Argetina. Swear to god.