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Lone Haranguer wrote:

jps wrote:

In article k.net,
says...

jps, hate-filled race-baiting bigot, wrote:

In article ,
says...

Harry Krause wrote:

I'm in downtown DC several days a week. As I walk from one
appointment
to another, I usually encounter some homeless or otherwise visibly
impoverished people. A high percentage of these folks are mentally
unbalanced, and some seem to be suffering from schizophrenia.

Apparently you are unaware that it was the social theories of liberals
who closed mental hospitals and turned those people out to the
streets.

Golly, that's the first I've heard that Ronny Raygun was a liberal.

It had nothing to do with Ronald Reagan, your former president. It
began long before he was president. It's a garden variety lie of the
left that he "caused" homelessness. It was the Kennedy
administration that began a policy to get crazies out of state mental
hospitals and back into the communities.

I beg to differ. Reagan took what was a system in transition and
doomed it to failure...

From a recent ABC news report:

This group bulged in size, largely due to a deliberate process of
"deinstitutionalization" first begun in the 1950s. A patient's best
interest, mental health experts then agreed, was served not so much by
long-term residential care, as by community outpatient treatment. As a
result, the number of resident mental health patients in the U.S.
dropped from 559,000 in 1955 to only 54,000 in 2000, Manderscheid
reports.

But the community outpatient care system that mental health providers
had hoped to build failed to blossom. A federal grant helped construct
about 750 new community health centers between 1963 and 1978; but when
the Reagan administration converted remaining funding into block
grants to states, most opted to finance currently existing mental
health centers, rather than build new ones. According to Manderscheid,
the envisioned community mental health system "froze at that point in
time."

The psychiatric ER stepped in to fill the gap in community mental
health care. Variously described as a place patients choose over
prison or a homeless shelter, or where social service agencies "dump"
their toughest cases, the psychiatric ER can play a recurring role in
a patient's behavioral pattern or disease cycle and is often the last
line of defense for repeat patients known as "frequent fliers."

As deinstitutionalization continued, releasing many of the mentally
ill to their hometowns, large numbers discovered they lacked families
and communities willing or able to care for them. Now homeless,
unemployed and uninsured, any health crisis brought them to the steps
of the ER =3F the one place that cannot turn them away.

According to logic, you should blame the states for diverting the money,
not Reagan for making the funds available in a different format.

Ah, but where's the emotional satisfaction in that?
Lying hate-blinded ideologues like 'jps' NEED devils
with names and faces to blame for what they falsely
consider to be injustice.

Nitwit.
LZ