N 1963, NEARLY 600,000 Americans lived in state-run hospitals because medical authorities insisted they were mentally ill and couldn’t live alone or with loved ones. In an address he gave that year to Congress, President John F. Kennedy described the facilities where these men and women were held, many against their will, as “unpleasant institutions from which death too often provided the only firm hope of release.” The libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in a 2000 interview with ’s Jacob Sullum,
