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Some of the best people I know are bipolar, depressive or otherwise afflicted with pointless mental illnesses. You probably could conclude that I'm crazy, too.

But I still favor laws that give governments more leeway to commit certain mentally ill people, involuntarily, into programs or institutions - where they could be forced, if not persuaded, to take their meds, live structured lives and get better, as far as possible. This includes versions of Kendra's Law passed by Albuquerque's City Council Monday and proposed statewide.

I believed this even through the '60s and '70s, when institutionalization was becoming uncool among the anti-establishment, crypto-libertarian Titans of tolerance with whom I often ran.

In 1972, I watched the first showing of Geraldo Rivera's TV expos‚ on the infamous Willowbrook State School for the mentally disabled. This disturbing report, with its shots of moaning kids twitching in filth, was credited with energizing the movement to deinstitutionalize.

In 1975, I saw the first run of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," starring Jack Nicholson, which made villains of hospital officials and heroes of sympathetic, odd-but-not-really-crazy patients.

I read R.D. Laing back then, who, in "The Politics of Experience" (1967), argued that crazy isn't insane and "what we call `normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience."

This primed me for deinstitutionalization, which aimed to take the mentally ill out of evil hospitals and repatriate them in good residential-care homes in regular neighborhoods. There, they would be more-or-less free to come and go. The movement also stressed the rights of the mentally ill to take or leave treatment.

All lovely ideas. Trouble was, I knew emotionally disturbed people from years of volunteer work my mom did at BOCES in New York. Intuitively, I didn't expect many of these folks to get along without a whole lot of help. And help, in the form of massive public funding for deinstitutionalization, wasn't forthcoming.

As a volunteer in Albuquerque, I've met many homeless people, maybe half of whom are mentally ill and 70 percent of whom are substance abusers. Shades of Willowbrook, some live in filth, expose themselves to both natural and criminal elements, stumble into traffic, hurt people, poison themselves with bad liquor and drugs and so on. Inside their heads, they are doing just fine on the streets, without their meds, thank you, and they would never willingly institutionalize themselves.

But clearly, they're not fine. Clearly, they'd be much better off in compassionate, well funded and regulated institutions.

No, there aren't enough such institutions to go around. And yes, there are civil-liberties concerns to address, lest we hospitalize folks as sane as Nicholson's R.P. McMurphy. But it's time to swing the pendulum back toward some middle.

People should embrace, not ostracize, the mentally ill, most of whom contribute heroically to society. Their differences from the norm are only a matter of degree. But there are efficiencies in institutions that could make life better, not worse, for mentally ill people who need the help.