Mental Health Advocates Say Reopening Institutions Won't Stop Mass Shootings

Dominic Sisti is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who co-wrote a paper titled "Bring Back the Asylum" in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2015, but he said on Monday that the President was "proposing an idea without any actual evidence or background knowledge."

Sisti has argued that the so-called "deinstitutionalization" movement has gone too far but said reversing it isn't the answer to America's mass shootings.

"We do need more mental health beds to help people with mental illnesses," said Sisti in an email. "However, the dearth of such beds is not the cause of mass shootings, nor will increases in beds be the solution."

He pointed to research he published in June with Isabel Perera, also at Penn, on institutionalization in other countries.

"We show that many other countries closed psychiatric institutions during the period of deinstitutionalization. None even come close to the US in mass shooting frequency."