Happy birthday, Gudanov, Sean, and Bridget!

Locking people away was awful and a recipe for abuse, but it’s also tremendously hard for people to get mental health care for themselves or their loved ones. I’m not sure what the best answer is for that dilemma.

Yes. I was working on the campus of an old state hospital shooting a television show. It was 600 acres of (now crumbling) dormitories in easy driving distance of my city with thousands of homeless people. That's madness. We really can figure out something besides "sleeping on cardboard" and "permanently locked up in squalor for being poor and/or disabled and/or mentally unbalanced."

There was a man I saw in San Francisco whom I will never forget. He had enormous tumors all over his face and body. He was bright red. He reeked of sweat and urine and alcohol. He was stumbling and skinny and frankly looked frightened. All I could think was "Someone needs to wrap him in a blanket somewhere he can get some sleep." I've lived in NYC most of my adult life, this is not the first hard-up person I've encountered but as soon as I was out of his seeing I burst into tears. My dad and I just stood there and raged. It was heartbreaking. We knew full well there were people in that community trying to help him but for some reason it was impossible.