Perhaps you are unfamiliar with JFK’s movement for deinstutionalization? If there was a serious cut in federal funding, it happened then. Reagan didn’t bring it back, but it was already mostly gone by his time. A good book to read is “American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System” by E. Fuller Torrey. Many historians who discuss the decline in public mental health in the US specifically site the book (and later the movie) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a principle cause for the shift in dollars. And really, the institutions were bad. Very bad. The attempt to replace them with something else ended-up being replaced with … nothing else except crime, homelessness, and police.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with JFK’s movement for deinstutionalization? If there was a serious cut in federal funding, it happened then. Reagan didn’t bring it back, but it was already mostly gone by his time. A good book to read is “American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System” by E. Fuller Torrey. Many historians who discuss the decline in public mental health in the US specifically site the book (and later the movie) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a principle cause for the shift in dollars. And really, the institutions were bad. Very bad. The attempt to replace them with something else ended-up being replaced with … nothing else except crime, homelessness, and police.