My mother has a lot of tales of life in NYC in the 1970s-80s. And she will talk endlessly about how the Reagan administration closed NYC’s state-run mental hospitals and asylums, which meant that the previously institutionalized “crazy people”* simply went onto the streets. There was a huge, unsustainable boom in the homeless population. Some of the displaced people were violent and had been committed to institutions due to criminal behavior. Some were just painfully lost and abused or brain damaged or disabled. Some were recently returned Vietnam vets who had been receiving treatment for PTSD when the hospitals closed. All of them - being formerly institutionalized mental patients - were completely unequipped to be dumped on the frankly filthy, violent streets of NYC.
Of course, since mental institutions in NYC were LITERAL HELL HOLES OF HORROR, there were a lot of good reasons for closing them down and de-institutionalizing was genuinely meant to be a good thing but it was unfortunately implemented by TOSSING THE PATIENTS INTO THE STREETS, which is not “reform.”
Reagan’s chirpy explanation (apparently) was that this would save lots of money. (And there were some Supreme Court decisions that ironically made this easier, such as the SCOTUS ruling “You can’t just imprison people for being sick or disabled” which was immediately interpreted as “Literally throw the sick and disabled into the streets! All of them! yay! saving so much money! The community will take care of them!”)
The community did not care for the former patients. The community was terrified and hateful and resentful and afraid.
So you’d be walking to work with a spatter of light incomprehensible violence breaking out (shit is that a knife shit is that blood, oh no I don’t want to get AIDS). Or scenes that really stick with you like walking past an amputee war vet, triggered and dissociating, crying and dragging himself along and grabbing for your ankles and begging you to help him find his legs AND YOU HAVE TO WALK PAST OH GOD OH GOD as you kind of ascend to another plane of anxiety because you will be fired if you’re late for work so this man just has to deal with his own shit. WHICH DID NOT CREATE AN ATMOSPHERE OF SERENITY, especially for a mentally ill person like my mother who still isn’t over it.
And there was AIDS. And some cold fucking winters. And bodies in the streets.
This contributed greatly to America’s fear of the mentally ill. So many stereotypes about homeless people and neurodiversity came from this. So much of the fear of this incredibly vulnerable population came from this. And the needed reforms didn’t happen. “Oh, we put them in asylums but that was bad, apparently, so we let them out and that was AWFUL, so.”
This has mostly been forgotten, anyway. But you can read articles like this one which talk about how instead of leading to mental healthcare reform this whole bright idea just … ended up channeling mentally ill people into prison, and we’re still paying for that in America, because prisons aren’t actually for that.
SO IT DIDN’T SAVE ANY MONEY, IS WHAT I’M SAYING.
* A lot of this memory/imagery is filtered through my mother and she was accurately reporting her beliefs and experiences but was not coming from a politically informed place at the time.