The effect of “failed” community mental health centers on non-white mortality

The Community Mental Health Act of 1963 established Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) across the country with the goal of providing continuous, comprehensive, community-oriented care to people suffering from mental illness. Despite this program being considered a failure by most contemporary accounts, the World Health Organization advocates for a transition from the institutionalization of the mentally ill to a system of community-centered care. In this paper, we construct a novel dataset documenting the rollout of CMHCs from 1971 to 1981 to identify the effect of establishing a CMHC on county level mortality rates, focusing on causes of death related to mental illness. Though we find little evidence that access to a CMHC impacted mortality rates in the white population, we find large and robust effects for the non-white population, with CMHCs reducing suicide and homicide rates by 8% and 14%, respectively. CMHCs also reduced deaths from alcohol in the female non-white population by 18%. These results suggest the historical narrative surrounding the failure of this program does not represent the non-white experience and that community care can be effective at reducing mental health related mortality in populations with the least access to alternative treatment options.