My father and three uncles came back from serving in WW2 and also became alcoholics. The local tap rooms in the local neighborhoods were full of them Friday through Saturday night in the post war years. If you truly went around the bend you were institutionalized in state run mental hospitals and you never came out. As a result of a court order, I think, in the early or late 1960s the institutions were closed and depopulated with patients turned out on the streets. My personal opinion is that that a lot of dangerous people on our streets today would be locked up if the system still existed. Whether such a system can be rationalized and justified is another question entirely.
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