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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
This problem started back when Reagan decided to get people out of mental institutions. They all went to the streets. I remember it well as I was starting a career in Chicago. Most Americans had never heard the word "homeless" before that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980

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Back when all the esteemed psychiatrists advised us that these people would be fine because of medications and should live freely. Very sadly, their lives would be much better if they were taken care of through required long-term hospitalization or group homes, rather than living on the streets. [/quote]

Yup, it's always 'Reagan's fault!' when there were so many progressives back then foaming at the mouth that it was cruel and inhumane to lockup people with mental problems in govt institutions. Liberals all told us they would be fine living in the world on their own. [/quote]
? no, that's not what happened. They wanted the mentally ill to be in locally controlled facilities with federally funding, but Reagan gutted the federal funds for the state run institutions.

Read the history of what happened.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-mental-hospitals-contribute-to-homelessness-here

[quote]1981 President Reagan repeals Carter’s legislation with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients back to the states. The legislation creates block grants for the states, but federal spending on mental illness declines. [/quote][/quote]

Yes, it is exactly what happened. You clearly only think these things were passed in a vacuum and not in the historical context of the Willowbrook State School report that broke out describing all of the 'horrors' at state run institutions that left a long lasting negative view of mental institutions. That's precisely the same kind of background that was behind the one flew over the cuckoos nest. Based on the outrage, it was actually John F Kennedy and his  Community Mental Health Act of 1963, a part of John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" social programs, that led to a lot of deinstitutionalization. His policy had an immediate and dramatic effect. In his message regarding his new program,  Kennedy set a quantitative target for this effort: a reduction by 50% or more of the number of patients then under custodial care, within ten or twenty years . In reality, the process of "deinstitutionalization" proceeded even more quickly and more extensively than that. By 1975, the number of patients in state and county mental hospitals had declined by 62% from the time of the President's message (65% from the peak of 559,000 in 1955). Falling further still over the next decade, the institutional census contracted to 110,000 in 1985 (NIMH 1989) despite growth in the US population and irrespective of the increasing number of mental hospital admissions over much of this period.

Carter tried to address the severe problem that Democrats and JFK started, true. And Reagan made the mistake of removing federal funding for mental institutions, which were under control of states, true. But all of this started loooooooong before Carter and Reagan got into office.  It was really JFK who opened the floodgates for deinstitutionalization and who started all of the problems with our mental healthcare.  The Willowbrook scandal had a lot of lasting impact, which people who only look at Reagan woefully ignore. [/quote]

I feel sure that the fact that JFK's sister Rose was given a lobotomy had a lot to do with his policies for those suffering from mental illness. The direction continued, and we now have a huge population of mentally ill people living homeless on the streets.[/quote]

Yes, absolutely. JFK's familial experience with institutionalization and the simultaneous hit from Willowbrook is precisely why he was so motivated to remove people from state institutions.  And that's how all the mentally ill ended up on the streets.....due to 'good intentions'.[/quote]

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