Given that homelessness rates almost directly correlate with cost of living, and not whether or not mental institutions exist, that’s the wrong reason to blame Reagan for a rise in homelessness. All of the union busting under his presidency is a much better reason
Well when you just dump people out of their (admittedly terrible) psyche housing into nothing, the homeless population increases quickly.
What about all the homeless that are too mentally ill to even sign up for welfare? Not that welfare even comes close to cost of living. There are quite a few of them.
He also oversaw a doubling of the prison population during his presidency. That’s not entirely (and maybe not even mostly) his fault - Congress and plenty of states were all about being “tough on crime,” but he was definitely on board with it. That probably also contributed to homelessness. People are significantly more likely than the general population to be homeless post-incarceration, and anyone who’s done time can tell you that it makes a lot harder to get a good job.
interesting community called c/debunkthis
look inside
1 post in the last 7 months, 1.3k points
no one debunking
more like c/circlejerk lol
A number of people replied about Reagan’s work ending state mental institutions, and made a lot of good points. One interesting aspect of that was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation. In the 60s and 70s, mental health professionals were advocating for moving from a institution-based model of care (a la “One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest”) to a community-based model (groups like https://www.reachinc.org/ basically follow this model). The basic thrust: ensuring that individuals are a part of a community, and care is tailored to the individual. It’s very well-meaning at its core. By the lat 70s, deinstitutionalization had (to some extent) become doctrine with experts working with disabled individuals. And for good reason! A number of early studies showed promising results! So come the 80s and Reagan. Reagan has an easy excuse for closing down institutions: experts in th field even recommend it! There’s one really important caveat, though: experts recommended diverting the funding the institutions had received into community-based support (again, see the link above for Reach as an example of how they imagined this funding being dispersed). Reagan…just cut the funding. So really, he did a “No Child Left Behind” 20 years earlier! Which, as I type it out…is even shittier. He gave false hope that he was actually going to do something great for mentally disabled people, and instead threw them on the street. Man. Reagan really sucked.
Side note: there are groups like Reach all over the US and the world, and they all could use help. Volunteers, funding, etc. A quick bit of research and you may meet some incredible people in your local community.
“Reagan”, not “Regan”
Thanks. Updated.
I think what everyone should recognize is that every president is going to have a list like this because they are all terrible presidents, in modern history.
But I bet he made a lot of money while doing that.
His not also destroy the public heathcare too?
You should be aware guys this is a pro trump thread. Negative Trump relayed comments have been removed (including mine) without reasons given. might be worth blocking this OP in the spirit of Lemmy.
Your comments were removed simply because they were off-topic or broke the civility rules, as did many others.
Apologies for not leaving a specific reason in each case, but there were a lot of comments that had to be removed and I’ve had a busy day.
I was unaware we were deleting comments arbitrarily defined as off topic on lemmy. This has toxic Reddit vibes.
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Technically Reagan started closing mental institutions while he was governor of California. He promised to open up alternatives and never did. It was a popular action that started when “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” showed abuse in the mental health system and the new system was suppose to have fixed those issues.
I think any institution where an individual has power over others is going to have some twisted, bad apples in there. Everyone I know knows someone who had a teacher in school go out their way to harm a child… Always for no other reason than personal gratification and bitterness. I absolutely believe there were and still are Nurse Ratcheds out there.
which is why you need well funded, well manned, aggressive oversigh with the power to issue immediate fines, revoke licenses, etc.
An imperfect solution where a perfect solution does not exist. Highly susceptible to corruption and waste, but I sure as heck would vote for it!
This is the problem, is that mental health abuses still happen today in whats left of mental health system in america.
We don’t need to tear it down, we need a federal oversight authority with balls and power to revoke licenses, issue massive fines, etc etc, with the funding and manpower to randomly inspect these facilities and interview patients at the drop of a hat, at any time of year, possibly multiple times a year.
and we need massive incentives to get hordes of new people, doctors, nurses, therapists, etc, into education to become qualified in their respective fields to do these jobs, and the fair pay for them.
I don’t think we should call them mental health abuses. There is abuse in the mental health system.
mental health abuses
I prefer the term “perverse psychiatry”.
My point was only that Reagan didn’t destroy the mental health systems while he was president. If you try bringing that up to a supporter, they will try and gotcha you on it. The other stuff was just to give some context as to why he was able to get away with it. Republicans never let a tragedy go to waste.
California was the first state to start dismantling their mental health systems and other states followed their lead, so most of the blame is still on him.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980
Repealed by Reagan.
He’s also a big reason why food prices are so high since he was president:
Which had the knock on effect of growing sugar in the Everglades which has contributed to much of the damage to them.
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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.
Thanks for your comment but in this community we always like to see sources.
Could you provide some citations to back up your claims?
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.
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.
Thank you for the clarification
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.
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No, that pretty much covers it
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He also further spread anti-government sentiment which has made society far worse as people question everything about government and how it can help people.
Why is questioning the government a bad thing? Shouldnt we have questioned the government more when we were looking for WMDs?
Difference between holding government accountable and outright saying government is always the problem. The latter only creates apathy among voters.
Not really, because the way to ensure government doesn’t do bad things is to vote. There’s no reason to believe that anti-government sentiment makes people politically apathetic.
There’s no reason to believe that anti-government sentiment makes people politically apathetic.
Do you think anti-government sentiment makes people less apathetic? I don’t mean fringes on Facebook, I mean regular people who work and pay their bills and have an hour to get whatever news they can before they sleep and do it all over again.
the way to ensure government doesn’t do bad things is to vote
Not in the US, it isn’t.
You summarized it well.
You have two different things there, holding the government accountable, is a thing that happens AFTER they have harmed you, why dont we have mistrust for them while they are making a claim?
Small recent example. General blanket distrust in government leads to unwillingness to trust governmental health experts, leading to making the covid pandemic worse than was necessary.
As was intended by those like Reagan.
Or conversely, the general trust in the government led people to go along with measures like lockdowns that harmed the economy, caused severe inflation, and didnt let the kids go to school.
You are literally repeating bullshit government talking points four years later, you need a little less trust in “experts”.
You are literally repeating bullshit conservative misinformation.
I am a former engineer, so I am a data driven person not a propaganda driven person. I watched the data they published and I saw exactly what happened before and after lockdowns, and it was literally zero change. But they kept doing it for year(s?) afterward because you guys trusted them. And if you dont believe me, they had a whole big data anaylsis by JP morgan chase at the time. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11687699/lockdowns-difference-coronavirus-destroyed-livelihoods-jp-morgan/
Did you know that the Boost app lets you add tags to people’s names?
I think its amusing that I trigger you guys so much just by disagreeing.
Are you aware that the worst atrocities committed by any group of humans have been committed by governments?
It’s good to question government. Governments’ relationship to their subjects is one of domination. That can go bad very quickly because it’s nothing like a relationship between equals.
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