By Danielle Ohl of Spotlight PA

In 2011, Pennsylvania made a promise: Everyone living in a state psychiatric hospital would come home.

No longer would having a serious mental health condition mean choosing between freedom and life-saving health care.

The promise was a transformed mental health system, where getting care for depression, or bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia would be like getting care for bronchitis, or lupus, or cancer.

Pennsylvania’s plan was ambitious, a roadmap to fulfilling a federal requirement to build a system that wouldn’t lock people away because of a treatable illness.

But tucked within that plan was a dire warning against a darker future for people with severe mental illnesses should the commonwealth fail: Homelessness, unemployment, relapse, and incarcerati

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