Despair's Profiteers.

It was not that long ago that mentally ill people, even those who were capable of living independently, were locked away by the tens of thousands in notoriously primitive hospitals. Congress passed the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, which forbids arbitrary and unjustified isolation of the mentally ill and requires the states to treat them in community-based settings in cases where this treatment is appropriate. A federal court ruling in New York last week shows that mentally ill people are still being illegally warehoused, this time in smaller, but still horrifyingly inadequate for-profit adult homes. Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that the state had violated federal disability law by confining more than 4,000 mentally ill people in privately run adult homes that he described as ''even more restrictive or 'institutional' than psychiatric hospitals.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]