Why did so many Mental Health Facilities close? Why were the mentally ill left homeless in the streets? If it was due to government budget cuts, did this actually save the government any money or did they just build more jails and prisons instead to house the mentally ill, who couldn’t care for themselves and making it a crime to be homeless?
None of this makes any logical sense to me. Or maybe this is just how the government works? The right hand never knows what the left hand is doing in America?
budget cuts
July 6th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
budget cuts
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July 6th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Reagan Federal budget cuts, based on his success saving money by releasing insane people from State Mental institutions as Governor of California;
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-mental-patients-began.html?sec=health
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July 6th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Two words… RONALD REAGEN
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July 6th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
It wasn’t just budget cuts. Sanatoriums got a bad name after the LSD experiments, and other "testing" that was done.
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July 6th, 2010 at 9:15 pm
In a 1975 case the supreme court ruled that people could not be held against their will just because they had been diagnosed as being mentally ill, they must be considered dangerous before they can be locked up. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O‘Connor_v._Donaldson
The people you see on the street could check themselves into hospitals if they wanted to, but it is now their choice, not the choice of their family. Most of the mentally ill get social security disability benefit so they are not starving nor do the end up in jail. It is not a crime to act weird, it just makes people around them uncomfortable. However there is no doubt that the states took advantage to the ruling to save money and reduced their spending on hospitals and not replacing them with out patient care.
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July 6th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Blame Ronald Reagan for the closing of mental health hospitals in California and across the United States. Is it any wonder that California seems to have all of the crazy homeless people? State mental hospitals were taken away by Governor Reagan in the seventies, and federal mental health programs were later taken away by President Reagan in the eighties.
When Ronald Reagan was governor of California he systematically began closing down mental hospitals, later as president he would cut aid for federally-funded community mental health programs. It is not a coincidence that the homeless populations in the state of California grew in the seventies and eighties. The people were put out on the street when mental hospitals started to close all over the state.
Seeing an increase in crime, and brutal murders by Herb Mullin, a mental hospital patient, the state legislature passed a law that would stop Reagan from closing even more state-funded mental health hospitals. But Reagan would not be outdone. In 1980, congress proposed new legislation (PL 96-398) called the community mental health systems act (crafted by Ted Kennedy), but the program was killed by newly-elected President Ronald Reagan. This action ended the federal community mental health centers program and its funding.
References :
http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/ronald-reagan-the-bad-and-the/page-2/#ixzz0rp5o0xd2
http://www.trivia-library.com/c/biography-of-us-president-ronald-reagan-part-6-california-governor.htm