The End of an Era
The Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex is closing for good. But what comes next?
CN: Involuntary treatment
For as long as I can remember, I have been mad with desire to see the Milwaukee Mental Health Complex—the site of my mother’s and countless others’ repeated incarcerations, psychiatric abuse, and neglect—not just closed, but demolished, razed to the ground, made into rubble.
I have been waiting so long, knowing this day was coming ever since it was first announced in the newspapers in 2015. When I was in Milwaukee for my research trip this past July, I drove by the entrance of the Psychiatric Crisis Service at the Mental Health Complex, and there I saw the sign announcing an actual date of closure: September 9, 2022. Finally, a date.
Then, on August 15, the press coverage began, following the official news release from the County: “Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex to Permanently Close as Mental Health Redesign Reaches New Milestone.”
“'A historic shift': Mental Health Emergency Center opening ushers in closure of the long-troubled Mental Health Complex,” reads the front-page headline in the August 15 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
One thing that does mark a historic departure: the new psychiatric emergency center has been moved from the County Institutions Grounds in Wauwatosa, where such places have been built and torn down for more than 100 years, to a location in 53205, one of Milwaukee’s most oppressed zip codes. According to the County’s data, the vast majority of folks going to —or being involuntarily brought to— the old institution in Wauwatosa were from 53205 and surrounding zip codes.
While multi-millions were found for a new emergency center, affordable housing waiting lists remain insurmountable for Milwaukee’s Black and Brown communities, impacted by decades of redlining and other racist policies designed to keep cycles of poverty and distress going.
City planners are now talking about a 30 year plan —30 fucking years— to create 64,000 units of affordable housing in the city.
And Wisconsin continues to have some of the highest rates of mass incarceration in the country, a distinction arrived at through decades of punitive and white supremacist “war on drugs” policies, like so-called “truth in sentencing” laws.
Without attending to these violent policies and the root causes of community distress in 53205 and surrounding zip codes, the dream of “community mental health,” the new, fancy slogans like “no wrong door,” feel like more of the same nightmare.
The more things change…?
Even with this “historic shift,” the carceral logics of mental health “care” are still very much intact.
“The center's physical redesign will feature different entrances for voluntary and involuntary patients,” says the Journal-Sentinel.
“The Mental Health Emergency Center will open its doors on Sept. 6 for patients brought in on their own or by loved ones. On Sept. 9 the center will be open for patients brought in by law enforcement,” says another local news story.
Wait, what?
Segregated entrances, for voluntary and involuntary patients? “Open for patients brought in by law enforcement?”
I’m imagining that the entrance for the involuntary folks is off to the side, or at the back of the building, so the coercion can take place out of sight. The very fact that these segregated entrances, these different opening dates for voluntary and involuntary treatment, were announced so nonchalantly, shows just how socially acceptable it still is to force people into “care” against their will.
And even with the closure of the Mental Health Complex, a shiny, new for-profit hospital was constructed to replace the “out of date” one, this time in West Allis.
This new hospital is being run by Universal Health Services, a corporation well-known for its (recent) history of Medicaid fraud, for keeping people there against their will for as long as possible to keep those payments coming in.
“The redesign of the behavioral health system in Milwaukee County is a journey,” reads the press release from the Behavioral Health Services. “While there is work ahead, collectively, BHS has achieved tremendous successes.”
Forgive me if I do not yet share in this self-declared “tremendous” success. In my time spent poring through the newspaper archives this summer, I read headlines from the late 1970s and early 1980s where the new, now “out of date” hospital was announced with similar fanfare, built to replace the “out of date” snakepit before it.
History always has a way of reminding us that there is nothing new under the sun.
As my friend Bruce Owens Grimm wisely says, “a haunting is a repetition.” We are still, collectively, haunted by the unfinished business of de-institutionalization, and carceral logics that keep morphing, keep perpetuating, reproducing, rebranding, reimagining themselves.
Time will tell.
I’m reading Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition by Liat Ben-Moshe, and deeply appreciate the framing of deinstitutionalization as “the largest decarceration movement in U.S. history.”
This analysis is a vital counter-point to the oft-repeated arguments of the pro-forced treatment crowd that deinstitutionalization caused mass incarceration and houselessness. According to their logic, if we re-opened the asylum, if we changed the laws to make it easier to keep people locked up for longer, then these problems would somehow magically disappear.
Ben-Moshe provides a needed corrective to such tropes, asserting that the true cause of mass incarceration and houselessness is “Racism and neoliberalism…via privatization, budget cuts in all service/welfare sectors, and little to no funding for affordable and accessible housing and social services, while the budgets for corrections, policing, and punishment (of mostly poor people of color) skyrocketed.”
Austerity. Carcerality. Ableism. Sanism. White supremacy. Logics of force and punishment. Segregated entrances for voluntary and involuntary folks. Despite promises, despite pretty-sounding words like “no wrong door,” these logics remain firmly in place in the settler colonial United States.
Don’t get me wrong: I still cheer the impending closure of the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex. That place was, and is, an abomination. I hope, hope, hope this “redesign” really does result in harm reduction—more access to voluntary community supports, less institutional care, less criminalization, as is being promised.
But I also can’t stop thinking that on September 9th, cops will be bringing people in against their will to a segregated entrance of the new Mental Health Emergency Center.
And the “state of the art,” for-profit psychiatric hospital looks hauntingly like the old, doesn’t it?
As these new “milestones” are proclaimed by the powers that be, I will keep demolition dreaming, abolition dreaming, and struggling in fierce solidarity with all people and movements fighting for a true historical shift, where the old is not continually repackaged as the new, where no one is forced into any door, because we have collectively learned how to care for one another without coercion, without violence, but with love, with respect, with decency and dignity.