Yes Liberals had a great deal to do with emptying the asylums onto our streets. Now these same Liberals complain about the homeless and overcrowding in the prison system. Did they ever stop to consider that the two are related.

The pathbreaking legislation in California was signed by St. Ronald Reagan himself. The original idea behind de-institutionalization was to shift a majority of patient care to community treatment centers--which, of course, were going to cost something. Conservatives opposed the expenditures, which were therefore never made. As a result, the mentally ill found that their new-found freedom was little more than freedom to roam the streets without help. In other words--they were (and are) victims of politics, as the weakest among us tend always to be. Ooops, I guess that's a liberal sentiment. To the workhouse with them!

It's absolutely the case that Reagan emptied the mental institutions, and it's also the case that this has been shown in retrospect to have been a very bad idea. Even had the "community treatment centers" been funded and built, the combination of the ex-patients' intrinsic mental illness and severe dislike of the antipsychotics' side effects would likely have meant that very few of their intended clientele would have actually used them. Turning the mentally ill into the streets was going to lead to mass homelessness, regardless of what was done to ameliorate the situation.

The odd thing is that positions appear to have changed 180 degrees. The conservatives appear willing to admit that deinstitutionalization was a mistake, even if they've conveniently forgotten that they initiated it. The far left (not all liberals) has in turn over-romanticized the "street people", much to the detriment both of the cities and the homelesss themselves. And the original article appears to have conflated the two sides' current positions with their positions at the time of deinstitutionalization.

I don't think anyone's clamoring for the mentally ill to be put in the workhouse. But there's a general consensus that mental institutions are a better place than steam grates.

tjcerveza: In the seventies when many psychiatric hospitals were shut down, the idea was to make communities deal with the mentally ill, rather than federal or state governments. They figured it would eliminate having to spend money on themill. But they did not foresee that community mental health centers would not be equipped to take proper care of this population. They did not have the means, man power, or laws in order to make them take medication against their will.

Nobody, regardless of whether they were liberal, libertarian, republican, monarchic, or oligarchic, foresaw the consequences we now face every day with millions of unmedicated people in state hospitals or jail.