I have heard that once thorazine was discovered and started getting used the rates of people in mental hospitals dropped dramatically. Does anyone have any statistics on this?
I think you’ll find many of the statistics you’re looking for in the first few pages of this PDF file.
There is considerable debate about just how much ‘modern’ anti-psychotics (Thorazine/Chlorpromazine etc) were responsible for deinstitutionalization and how much of it was a social movement. There is no doubt that the symptom relief provided by the drugs was a factor in people leaving hospital but it is at least arguable that a considerable cause of people leaving hospital was the changing social attitudes about incarceration. An example would be the deinstitutionalization of people with Mental Retardation (learning disability/difficulty or mental handicap) in industrialized countries that happened at the same period 1950-1970.