Look up "Willowbrook" and Geraldo Rivera. He did an expose of a NY state hospital that was a literal hell on earth. Unfortunately, one political party saw in it the opportunity to use it as a hammer to push the 'civil rights' of the mentally ill.
Now consider this was during an era when civil rights were still a legit hot topic, but losing steam as most battles had been won.
As a result, tens of thousands of legitimately mentally ill people who actually needed inpatient care were dumped on the streets in the name of civil rights. And naturally the Democrats responsible (and a few left leaning power hungry Republicans as well) were there with a plethora of 'public programs including housing, welfare etc to address this sudden 'crisis.'
You may notice that in the years since, a lot of cities are now in full control of one party pushing many of the same ideas. And it is all but impossible to get someone committed to a mental institution without a massive and costly legal battle.
You may also have noticed that those places have an even larger homeless problem for the wise and kindly city leaders to campaign around/address.
I wonder why...
Not trying to power level here but I can add a bit more context to this as well. Whle it is true that the laws and regulation involving mental illness were taken a bit too far, there were quite a few legit reasons behind it. The conditions and happenings in the institutions were incredibly inhumane for the most part and despratly needed to be hosed down. This was also during an era where full frontal lobotomies where still being performed as a treatment for everything from paranoid schizophrenia to depression. During this time advances in medicine related to mental health were happening that lead to drugs such as largactil in the 60's. The problem with alot of these early meds and some still today is that they either had worse side effects than the illness they were supposed to treat, and they also lead to much more severe illness's that compounded on the original diagnosis.
One of these conditions is tardive dyskinesia which causes the person to have jerky movements, hang their toungue out without meaning to and all kinds of other effects that ironically make them stick out as mentally ill even more. Then because early on these were misdiagnosed as the illness progressing as opossed to being a side effect of the drugs it made care for these individuals even harder and to counter that they added even more drugs and even lobotomies because they were understaffed and not well trained to deal with them; in other words they messed them up further with drugs and then chemically or physically restrained them which further compounded the already overwhelmed health care system.
Fast forward to the late 90's early 2000's and all of the special interest groups and politicians still pushing the civil rights issue began trying to score brownie points by attempting to create more humane treatments. This lead to several different strategies, but one that I can remember by name was "Culture change", which specifically wanted to de-institutionalize mental health and elder care and make it more "humane". The way it was supposed to work is to make senior care facilities less like a hospital and more like a retirement community and to make group facilities for the mentally ill less about locking them in rooms drugged out of their minds and more like a summer camp for lack of a better analogy. Now a lot of what they set out to do was actually admirable and a good thing, but there was one problem that no pearl clutcher or politician has ever been able to solve. It was expensive.
So expensive in fact that it was immediately overwhelmed and compounded further on health care being under staffed and under paid, so then they started trying a new strategy of pushing as many as they could out into the community where they could sponge off of social security and medicare, off setting some of the costs. In the senior care side of this they began building legit suburb style communities and each house would have 3 to 5 residents with their own small team of health care workers for each house. On the mental health side they made smaller group homes in the same vain, but also began a system of letting the patients live in the community with staff support.
The problem that this method is now faceing how ever is once again, its more expensive than anyone wants to actually fund. So in the begining it was a boom, but then they started cutting funding to save money that they never wanted to spend in the first place. So its a constant battle between wanting to sweep these people under the rug out of sight out of mind in the vain of the NIMBY's, while also virtue signaling for clout, voters, and ass pats. The end result is an overwhelmed, under funded mess only marginally better than the original problem.
