The way we treat the mentally ill is deplorable

Unless you were unlucky enough to be born a foreigner, I can assume that we are all Americans here. We live in, or are from, the most wealthy and powerful nation on earth. Mountains move at our whim; nations topple at our insistence. Our feats of engineering are marvelous works and our social welfare is second to none--unless you ask the recipients of said welfare. They're never satisfied. All in all, we live in a fairly progressive country, one that we can all be proud of and which is the envy of would-be fat people the world over. However, there is one section of our citizenry which does not receive the due care and attention that they deserve. One area in which we are still as backwards as the most retarded Albanian. That area, my fellow Americans, is how we care for the mentally ill.
To be sure, progress has been made. Not but a hundred years ago, we shackled our mentally retarded Americans in padded rooms and administered electro-shock therapy. Well, we've removed the shackles, but we're still not a lot better off than we were when Teddy Roosevelt was president and tried to have the letter "e" officially removed from the word "whiskey." Many concerned people, myself among them, would say that we are actually crueler and less understanding towards the mentally sick than we were in the age before radio. We have the best doctors, the most robust pharmaceutical industry on the planet, and yet we still cannot aid those who need it the most. It's a damn shame.
One needs only watch a few reality programs centered around celebrities to understand how bad this problem has become. These people are the most debased, retarded, and borderline schizoid persons to be shown on television since The Arsenio Hall Show was still on the air. One can't help but pity them. Here is a group of people that can barely perform basic duties for themselves, and what have we, as a nation, done? We've allowed them access to millions of dollars and shoved cameras in their faces. Ladies and gentlemen of sanity, the blame lies squarely with ourselves. We have failed our mentally ill Americans in the worst way.
We don't need to keep stumbling down this morally bankrupt and deplorable path. We can still save the Michael Jacksons, the Tom Cruises, the Lindsay Lohans and the Oprah Winfreys of the world if we band together and say, "I'm sorry. We should never have allowed you unfettered access to money and publicity. We should never have filmed your moronic antics for everyone to laugh at. That was mean of us. But rehabilitation begins today." These people need our help, now more than ever. Many of them have such bizzare delusions of grandeur that they have sought--and won--public office. Many of them are self-styled revolutionaries with paranoid complexes, like George Clooney. But these people need not despair in the dark recesses of the human mind and longer. If we take a stand and promise our mentally indigent citizens that we will care for them in the way a functioning society should--that is, with electro-shock treatments and lobotomies--then we can turn around this shameful facet of American life right away. It isn't too late to save our country's retarded celebrities. Except for Gary Busey, that is. I'm pretty sure he's a lost cause.