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the same time weeding out those whose motivation is primazily pecuniary, something the Department of Health seems either unable or unwilling to accomplish. The rationales for the above conclusions aze given in the rest of my statement, below. First, I want to give you a sense of both my history and second, the history of group home sitting. This will allow my conclusions and recommendations made above about the proposed bill to be placed in a reasonable context and, one can hope, make it more persuasive to you and others. In the middle 1970s, I was the Chair of a fairly lazge Psychology Department in a Midwestern state. We developed the first doctoral program in Rehabilitation Psychology in that state. This program developed against the background of the closure of lazge mental hospitals across the country and the initiation of the community mental health movement. We took as our aim to provide highly trained professional staff for these new institutions, although few knew what those institutions would look like or where they would be located. Later on in the 1980s some colleagues and I evaluated the case management system for community mental health centers for an entire but different state3. I tell you this because this background gives me a unique perspective, that of a social researcher, on the proposal that is before you today. The group home movement grew out of the deinstitutionalization (what the British called "normalization") of inmates of large state run mental institutions. These edifices often mixed the mentally ill, the retarded, and even the criminally insane. Horrors were perpetrated on the inmates due to poor staffing, uncaring administrations and the primitive state of our understanding of mental illness. Such therapies as pre-frontal lobotomies, insulin coma and shock, electric shock, sterilizations, and experimental drug regimes were common as were physical attacks including rapes and murders. These were truly the snake pits of their time. As these horrors became common knowledge through various press accounts, pressure developed to close these large institutions. The feeling was that the size and isolation of the institutions kept the patients from developing the skills that would be necessary before they could be allowed back into the wider society. The solution was to develop community based facilities that would duplicate family structures so that the clients could eventually be released to live on their own or with their families. A close reading of the literature on deinstitutionalization would suggest that these new institutions were not to be simply smaller fortresses plunked down into communities, but were to be integrated into their surroundings with local citizens playing important roles in the rehabilitation of the clients. Unfortunately, this did not occur for two reasons: funding cycles and good old American capitalism (doing the least for the maximum return). While on this was going on, another movement, that of sitting of noxious and environmentally degrading facilities (e.g., sewage plants, waste dumps, power plants, etc.) was gathering notice. As local protests against some of the potential sites increased a set of acronyms came into common usage: NIMBY (not in my back yazd), NODS (not on our stree~, LULU (locally unwanted land uses) and others. In an otherwise excellent paper Michael Dear stereotypes the protesters as prejudiced, probably unwashed, and certainly opposed to progress. Developers fought back with SLAPP suits (strategic lawsuits against public participation) and some communities and individuals counterattacked with SLAPP-back suits some of which were quite successful. The protester demonization by developers formed the political substrate for the next important stage: the passage of the Fair Housing Act and its later modifications extending the definition of protected classes. 3 Fisher, G. ,Landis, D. and Clark, K.(1988) Case management service provision and client change. Community Mental Health Journal, 24, 134-142. Clark, K.A., Landis, D., and Fisher, G.(1990) Client characteristics impact on case management service provision. Evaluation and Program Planning, l3, 221-229. ~ Dear, M. (1992). Understanding and overcoming the NIMBY syndrome. Journal oftheAmerican Planning Association, 58(3J.