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.