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Mental health advocates are grateful to the New York Times for its exposes of hazardous conditions in the state's adult homes and nursing homes affecting some 15,000 persons. Not only do residents with mental illness lack even minimal care at many of these facilities, but the operators often violate their clients' civil rights. In the case of adult homes, residents' lives may also be at risk either from negligence or abuse.

In response, the Pataki administration has created an advisory group of state officials and mental health advocates who have recommended that treatment should be turned over to state-hired mental health workers at a cost of $100 million a year, but with the owners still in possession of the homes. Neither the governor nor the legislature has made a commitment to fund the plan.

The state would also build 5,000 units of housing over 10 years to gradually replace the homes at a cost of perhaps $500 million. But this recommendation might pit adult home residents against the homeless mentally ill because the Governor has yet to approve a new round of funding for the latter population, funding which he allocated in previous years.

Meanwhile, the state Office of Mental Health has wisely discontinued the program of transferring patients from state hospitals to locked floors in some nursing homes. The practice appeared to violate federal standards designed in the 1980s to prevent patient dumping. However, private agencies may continue sending their patients to such homes. Unfortunately, these revelations are not new. This is the second or third time around in the past 20 to 30 years for exposes of adult homes and nursing homes. In the past few years, we have also read horror stories about mentally ill offenders languishing in jail and mentally ill children trapped in hospitals for lack of community treatment. Some of us have realized the promise of independence and self-sufficiency proclaimed by public officials at the dawn of deinstitutionalization. But many more of us remain in limbo between the old system and the new.

The truth is that we have too often substituted a policy of community isolation for the physical restraint that once dominated treatment in state mental institutions. Unfortunately, social isolation, whether on the streets, in shelters, jails, SROs, adult and nursing homes, breeds physical exploitation.

To sum up the history of abuse and neglect, the Mental Health Association of New York State (MHANYS) recently calculated that, before the Community Reinvestment Act of 1994, the State closed tens of thousands of inpatient beds and used the savings to finance the general operations of government rather than to support community mental health care.

This is a case for reparations to the mentally ill-in the form of a guarantee for quality treatment. MHANYS would create continuity of care based on the recovery model with easier access and greater accountability.

The association recalls the Carey administration's promise in the wake of the Willowbrook scandal of the 1970s, when abuse of the developmentally disabled was uncovered at a state institution on Long Island. MHANYS would be satisfied if the state did for the mentally ill what they achieved for the developmentally disabled, namely the provision of lifetime housing as the foundation of treatment.

By all rights, the latest revelations should provoke monumental demonstrations whether advocates want to repair a part or the whole system. But if outrage doesn't work, perhaps voting on November 6 will.

The last thing most Americans expect the mentally ill to do is act like citizens. In their minds, we are too ill to give a damn about our fellow Americans.

Then voting is like turning the other cheek and the voting booth is a kind of confessional for those of us dissatisfied with the status quo. The trend in this society is that the downtrodden don't vote with their feet or any other appendage. So, on November 6, pull that lever as if you were pulling your weight.

But don't just vote. Keep in mind MHANYS' vision for a better system. Make your vote count by letting the politicians know what they have to do to keep or win your vote. And let the various advocacy groups know how they can gain and maintain your membership. According to the New York Times, hardly any of them knew about the latest scandals.

Many of us speak for those who are supposedly voiceless. It's a bond we need to constantly renew. The press, including this newspaper, should walk the walk as the New York Times has done by venturing into the city's mental health hinterlands. It's a freedom and a responsibility we should all enjoy.