GREAT MOMENTS IN YELLOW JOURNALISM.

Let us recognize Marina Pitofsky, Morale Conditioner with USA Today.  "Donald Trump mocks Jimmy Carter's presidency day after Rosalynn Carter entered hospice care."  The former president simply spouted a right-populist talking point of long pedigree.

Former President Donald Trump mocked former President Jimmy Carter at an event in Iowa on Saturday, one day after the Carter family publicly confirmed former first lady Rosalynn Carter has entered hospice care.

Trump, criticizing Biden at a rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, told a crowd of supporters that “the happiest person anywhere in this country right now is Jimmy Carter because his administration looked brilliant compared to these clowns.”

“Compared to Biden, Jimmy Carter was a brilliant, brilliant president,” Trump said.

It's not as if the rally wasn't scheduled long before the former first lady's health status changed, or that the Jarrett regency is bringing the malaise back as fast as they can get Dementia Joe to sign executive orders.   What was he supposed to do, ask for thoughts and prayers for the Carter family, now in civilian life, and then note that it's only compared with the current regime that the Carter administration looks good.

The next day, Mrs Carter departed this life.  Ms Pitofsky had a co-Morale Conditioner for the obituary.  "Former first lady Rosalynn Carter, the devoted wife of the nation's 39th president and a tireless advocate for mental health care, has died."  She shared one ambition with Jill Biden, Ed.D.  "She campaigned aggressively for [Jimmy], energizing supporters and once admitted being more adamant about winning than he was."

Let us note with respect her work on behalf of mental health.

Kathy Cade, who served as special projects director to the first lady, said Carter was inspired to pursue mental health reform after watching a distant cousin suffer mental illness when she was a child.

When Jimmy Carter ran for governor of Georgia, Rosalynn Carter discovered how public programs for people with mental illness were abysmal, leaving families struggling to find care.

In 1977, Carter became honorary chair of the President's Commission on Mental Health.

The position allowed Carter to continue her work in ending the mental crisis that she started as first lady of Georgia.

She led efforts to pass the Mental Health Systems Act in 1980, which provides grants to community mental health centers.

Mental health and mental illness are two aspects of human existence that are not well understood by humans, despite a great deal of intellectual energy expended on that understanding.  The very real Cuckoo's Nest and the very fictional Shutter Island didn't offer much by way of rehabilitation, and the mental health disciplines rely as much on popular opinion as they do on The Science^TM to practice their craft.  It was not given to Mrs Carter to finish the task and yet we must not give it up.

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, unfortunately, aren't yet well-enough developed to be able to assess such claims in a systematic way.  We're a century or so away from eugenics and sterilization, three score and ten years or so away from frontal lobotomies, and forty years ago Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had regime psychiatrists diagnosing dissidents as schizophrenic, in order to make the dissenters go away whilst claiming the corrective labor camps were for more conventional criminals alone.  There is a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for neuroses and psychoses, but the committee that revises it responds to Popular Sentiment.  That is not the behavior of scholars confident in their paradigm.

Nor did closing the Cuckoo's Nest with scant attempts to help the patients returned to normal life help.  Mike Royko saw the effects years ago.

I've referenced his observation previously.  "He had written a column about the proliferation of beggars in the Loop, in which he suggested that closing the asylums and condemning the flophouses in the name of urban renewal provided the cause."

What's it going to take, a full-on outbreak of the bubonic plague before the Smart People catch on?  "America abandoned a custodial approach to mental illness a half-century ago, and the results have been obvious in the nation’s streets and public spaces ever since — and never more so than on the Bowery early Saturday morning." "Bowery," dear reader, is New York for "skid row," and, although it has always been with us, New York Post columnist Bob McManus is making the same point Mr Royko made about Chicago, in the pre-digital era.

About all Our Progressive Betters do is hide the disturbed people away while the Chinese dictator is in San Francisco.

The people who used to inhabit Shutter Island don't have those resources, but they always have San Francisco.  "The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals, the closure of psychiatric hospitals begins after World War II. It accelerates under President John Kennedy. … It was progressives who led the charge to empty the mental hospitals. The promise was we would have community-based care. That was never built."

Community based care.  Sounds like one of Mrs Carter's aspirations, doesn't it?

Never mind that in a few thousand years maybe we got a few things right, and coming up with pejorative labels for institutions that confer evolutionary advantage might not be as productive as, oh, coming to some understanding of why mental health challenges might come in bundles.  Or why Middlebury might be mistaken for an asylum.

Perhaps the best way for Normals to honor Mrs Carter might be to reintroduce bourgeois conventions and serious scientific principles into mental health and mental illness work.  R.I.P.