Delonte West, Mental Health, Tony Reali

I did check. In fairness the bill was bipartisan and two of the three legislative sponsors were Democratic.

1967 Reagan signs the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act and ends the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will, or for indefinite amounts of time. This law is regarded by some as a “patient's bill of rights”. Sadly, the care outside state hospitals was inadequate.Dec 8, 2016
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Did the Emptying of Mental Hospitals Contribute to ... - KQED

 

I was picking up my kids from school yesterday, driving down Route 1 in northern Virginia, and I swore I saw Delonte West on the median panhandling at one of the traffic lights.

I did a little digging when I got home and found out he was in DC for Big 3 Basketball tryouts last month. He didn’t get drafted. Then I saw this “tweet,” the pic taken at a 7-11 that’s a block away from where I saw him. Very sad story just keeps getting sadder.

 

Where I went to college there was a shuttered mental health hospital. The homeless population can almost be directly tied to the closing of the facility. Some bad stuff happened at the facility, including lobotomies, but in hindsight the community and truly humane aspects of the facility probably outweighed the bad. Like public housing efforts of the 1960’s, sometimes the best intentions are bad policy.But that’s easy for me, a person who didn’t have to live in that facility, to say.

 

Ronald Reagan's shameful legacy: Violence, the homeless, mental illness

One month prior to the election, President Carter had signed the Mental Health Systems Act, which had proposed to continue the federal community mental health centers program, although with some additional state involvement. Consistent with the report of the Carter Commission, the act also included a provision for federal grants “for projects for the prevention of mental illness and the promotion of positive mental health,” an indication of how little learning had taken place among the Carter Commission members and professionals at NIMH. With President Reagan and the Republicans taking over, the Mental Health Systems Act was discarded before the ink had dried and the CMHC funds were simply block granted to the states. The CMHC program had not only died but been buried as well. An autopsy could have listed the cause of death as naiveté complicated by grandiosity.

Public Policy and Mental Illnesses: Jimmy Carter's Presidential Commission on Mental Health

The Mental Health Systems Act had hardly become law when its provisions were rendered moot. The inauguration of Ronald Reagan in January 1981 led to an immediate reversal of policy. In the summer of 1981 the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act became law. Under its provisions, the federal government provided block grants to the states for mental health services and substance abuse, although at levels of about 75 to 80 percent of what they would have received under the Mental Health Systems Act. The states had considerable leeway in expending their allocations. With a few exceptions—notably, the patients’ bill of rights—the Mental Health Systems and CMHC Acts were repealed, thus diminishing the direct role of the federal government in mental health (Public Law 1981). The transfer and decentralization of authority merely exacerbated the existing tensions, as federal support was reduced at precisely the same time that the states were faced with social and economic problems that increased their fiscal burdens.