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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Almost all mental health institutions were either run by the state or country and relied on very little federal funding. Their popularity collapsed after the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that depicted such institutions in negative light. Reagan may be to blame for the other items but not this.
They were called State Houses for a reason. However, they did rely on no small amount of federal funding, even indirectly. Carter started a bill (MHSA1980) that was supposed to help mental health institutions like these, Regan killed it, and the promise was that the states would rework how these mentally ill were handled. Nobody ever got around to it. Taxes = evil, and there was also a study that was pushed hard by anti-tax types to “mainstream” mental patients. More cost cutting by closing State institutions and booting the patients into the public and like I said, the help never materialized. That’s the quick and dirty version.
The movie had nothing to do with it.
You are only partially correct about Reagan. He isn’t entirely responsible, but he absolutely had a hand in it. Cutting a bunch of the MHSA and the failure was also the State’s unwillingness to maintain public Institutions, but that ties in with the deregulation during the early ‘80s (Reagan’s doing) as well as fixing Medicare prices to hospitals so that hospitals had to look elsewhere to make money, and that means you and I paid more.
So yeah, loss of mental health care facilities and health care costs in general are directly tied to the Reagan administration’s actions in the early 1980s.
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.