REAGAN DID NOT CREATE HOMELESSNESS BY EMPTYING THE ASYLUMS
by Thomas M. Sipos,
managing editor [April 11, 2025]
[HollywoodInvestigator.com]
For over
thirty years I've been hearing that Ronald Reagan, while governor of
California (1967-75), created the homeless crisis by throwing the
mentally ill out of institutions and onto the streets. Not only is
this canard continually repeated, but it's grown. Recently I heard
talk radio show caller complain that
President
Reagan created homelessness (presumably throughout America) by
emptying the asylums.
It's true that in
1967 California ended forced institutionalization of the mentally ill.
But the 1960s progressive counter-culture, and the state legislature.
had more to do with that than did Reagan.
In
The Fresno Bee
(Sept. 15, 2022),
Tom Balch
writes:
"The emptying of California’s state mental hospitals resulted
from the passage, in 1967, of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (named
for the sponsors, two Democrats, one Republican).
"This bill, known as LPS, was advanced in response to pressure
from mental health professionals, lawyers, patient’s rights advocates,
and the ACLU. When fully implemented in 1972, LPS effectively ended
involuntary civil confinement of mental patients in California.
"The Democrat-controlled Legislature passed LPS with
overwhelming majorities; the vote was 77-1 in the Assembly, and the
margin was similar in the Senate. Gov. Reagan signed the bill."
And so you
see, the bill was passed by veto-proof majorities in a Democratic
legislature. Reagan had no legal authority to stop it. Had he ignored
the law once it was passed, progressives would have denounced him as
"a threat
to democracy."
As for the
cultural milieu, well, it was the Sixties, and there was "something in
the air" back then. The mentally ill were romanticized as "free
spirits" who marched to a different drummer. Asylums were demonized as
prison camps tasked with enforcing societal conformity.
For
instance, in 1961, Thomas Szasz's well-received book,
The Myth of Mental Illness,
challenged the authority and expertise of the psychiatric profession,
and the very notion of "mental illness."
The film,
David and Lisa
(1962), depicted the romance between a young couple in an asylum. The
asylum was not portrayed as evil, but neither was it helpful. Only
David and Lisa's mutual love and understanding could help each other
get well.
A darker
perspective appeared that same year in Ken Kesey's best-selling novel,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
which portrayed forced institutionalization as inhumane. In 1963, Dale
Wasserman adapted the novel into a play. The 1975 film version won
five Academy Awards.
This attitude
toward forced institutionalization became so widespread that by the
1970s, the story of a sane person involuntarily committed to a "snake
pit" asylum was a staple of horror, exploitation, and TV movies.
Governor Reagan
was but a small cog in a progressive, counter-cultural zeitgeist that,
along with the ACLU, was combating forced institutionalization. And
for better or worse, the progressives (and libertarians) won. In 1967
California ended forced institutionalization.
Yes, it came with
a price. Some patients never belonged in an institution. But some
can't survive outside of one. They end up homeless. But you can't pin
the blame entirely, or even mostly, on then Governor Reagan.
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