PETER ST ONGE: Closing the asylums was one of the most catastrophic decisions of the past 50 years. Was prison always the goal of Reagan emptying insane asylums?

Don't like homelessness?  Thank Ronald Reagan. 

Closing the asylums was one of the most catastrophic decisions of the past 50 years. https://t.co/k7Z31vgG5X

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) November 2, 2025

Many patients were released into the community without adequate support systems, leading to increased homelessness and many individuals ending up in jails and prisons, which are not equipped to provide proper mental health care. The deinstitutionalization movement, initiated in the 1960s and continued under Reagan, aimed to shift care to community settings, but those facilities were often never built or adequately funded.

from Thousand Oaks Acorn. Oh, boy.

1980, In 1980, under Jimmy Carter, the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 was passed.  This bill provided federal grants to local community mental health centers. One year later, the 96th Congress, with a Democratic majority in both houses, repealed the act.

1972, What Reagan did do, as governor of California, was to sign the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act [in 1967] but go into full effect in 1972. That bipartisan legislation made mandatory institutionalization of mental health patients by family members and civil courts illegal. That way a bad judge or vindictive relative couldn’t have you locked up indefinitely at a state hospital.

The result of that humanitarian legislation was that populations in state hospitals dropped, but Reagan didn’t directly oversee, direct or cause any hospital closures.

1990s, The majority of mental hospitals in California were actually closed in the late 1990s, when Pete Wilson formed a task force to examine state hospital operations. The task force found that the populations of many state hospitals had dropped dramatically and the per-capita costs had skyrocketed to $114,000 per year. 

1997, Camarillo State Hospital, 1936-1997, (also known as Camarillo State Mental Hospital) in Camarillo, California, officially closed on June 30, 1997. This followed years of declining patient numbers due to reforms like the 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act [signed by Reagan] and rising costs, leading to Governor Pete Wilson's decision in 1996 to shut it down. The site later became California State University Channel Islands, with classes starting in 2002. While one source mentions a partial closure in 1996, the full and permanent closure was in 1997.

On Thousand Oaks Acorn, it is odd that the internet would produce two opposing stories, here and here.  

Apparently, it was Edmund Pat Brown who initiated the closure of the mental hospitals.  

Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, as Governor of California from 1959 to 1967, initiated significant reforms in the mental health care system, which included the release of patients from state mental hospitals. This shift was part of a broader movement towards deinstitutionalization, influenced by the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967, which aimed to grant patients more civil rights and integrate them into community care.

Here are the receipts,

If there was any single event that sped the emptying of state asylums in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was the publication of these staffers’ 204-page report entitled, “The Dilemma of Mental Commitments in California.”

The report was an exposé, a philosophical treatise, and a policy prescription. It became public on Nov. 24, 1966, three weeks after Ronald Reagan defeated Democratic Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, and six weeks before Reagan took the oath of office at the Capitol in Sacramento.

“The Dilemma of Mental Commitments in California” is all but forgotten today, existing on a few library shelves. There’s no digital version. But it framed the legislative debate in 1967 and led to one of the most consequential pieces of legislation ever signed in California, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act.