Reply #29: Reagan cut both-low income housing & funding for mental health institutes.

[laughingliberal]

First, he made cuts in CA while governor. Then he treated the entire country to his form of cruelty to the mentally ill.

The Ugly: the closing of mental health hospitals in California and across the United States.<edit> 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 (see timeline on this link) program and its funding.


Read more: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/ronald-reagan-the-bad-and-the/#ixzz0z3YfZBhp

The first thing wrong with the 'most homeless people are mentally ill' meme is, as you point out, it's not true.

The second thing wrong is that the proper response to those who are is to obtain help for them, not dismiss them as less than human.