Reply to How can we strengthen our laws.to have severely mentally ill in the District committed?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980

The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 (MHSA) was United States legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter which provided grants to community mental health centers. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan and the &lt;Republican&gt; U.S. Congress repealed most of the law.[1] The MHSA was considered landmark legislation in mental health care policy.

https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-reagan-and-the-federal-deinstitutionalization-of-mentally-ill-patients/comment-page-1/[/quote]

Ahem, the Democrats controlled the US House of Representatives in 1981. 272 Dems to 159 Republicans.

I looked at that link and it is heavily partisan. And a law that was repealed a year after it was passed means it had no real impact on the mental health situation at the time. What the repeal of the law did not do was repealing the Patient's Bill of Rights, which remained in place.

The ACLU was heavily involved in promoting civil rights for the mentally ill throughout the 60s and 70s. There was a big push to close down the institutional state mental institutions and replace them with smaller group homes for a variety of reasons, most of which were sincere but ultimately not successful or effective, because a large part of the problem aren't the people who are seriously mentally ill but the more moderately mentally ill who can rapidly or suddenly turn violent when provoked or under the influence of drugs. It's also why the original premise of community based health centers promoted by the MHSA never really worked out because on a low level these centers were wholly incapable of tracking the mentally ill who drift in and out of group housing depending on the degree of their drug abuses. They couldn't, by law, restrain the moderately mentally ill who would have benefited the most from being institutionalized and under a regime. The centers were also places that couldn't allow drugs, and the mentally ill were dependent on drugs. [/quote]

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