America really is a special environment that facilitates the creation of these characters, other countries usually lock em up, tie the tubes, or gets rid of em.
I'm told that we used to be more effective in that regard, but several decades ago, too many people whose hearts are bigger than their brains saw Cuckoo's Nest and thought it was real, campaigned to release all the crazies out into the wild.
On the surface I can understand it. Imagine the horror of being stripped of your rights and freedoms, locked in a boring facility, pumped full of mind-altering drugs, and controlled in every aspect of your existence. It sounds scary, but that's because you're looking at it from the perspective of someone with a fully functioning brain.
But flip it around and imagine that your brain is broken. You're thrown into a society that you do not understand. You're expected to get a job, but you have no worthwhile skills. You're expected to follow rules, laws, and societal norms, but they make no sense to you. In order to receive the assistance that you need, you have to seek it out, and you lack the faculties and resources to do that. Many others simply take advantage of your issues for their own gain. You wind up being bounced between the emergency room, jail, and the gutter -- none of which wind up helping at all.
In that case, locking them away in asylums to at least attempt to keep them from hurting themselves and those around them -- and maybe working to address their mental illness, which they cannot manage themselves -- is the humane option.
But instead, we choose to just throw them out in the streets, pretending that they're normal, and having the nerve to act surprised when they fail.
