Historical American policy toward bipolar disorder, clinical depression, and schizophrenia has changed drastically over the last two centuries and especially the last fifty years. I am sure everyone is aware of the reputations of American mental institutions of the past where patients were effectively imprisoned whether they had committed a crime or not. They were diagnosed by a doctor as "potentially" dangerous and that was it. Mental home for you. You will be released when the doctor thinks you are ready to join society. The modern way of dealing with the mentally ill is with a combination of psychiatric drugs and psychotherapy. This is mostly a voluntary process. I do not need much convincing that this is a ridiculously weak policy. One statistic I came across tells me everything I need to know about all the crackpot shootings over the last few decades, In 1955 for every 100,000 US citizens there were 340 psychiatric hospital beds. In 2005 there were 17 per 100,000.