Emptying mental hospitals was a joint decision

I’ve heard it said that the problem with liberals is that most of what they know turns out not to be true. Chris Theile would have The Bee’s readers believe that Republicans are responsible for all the mentally ill people on our streets, so he repeats the liberal canard that Ronald Reagan closed all the state mental hospitals.

The emptying of California’s state mental hospitals resulted from the passage, in 1967, of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (named for the sponsors, two Democrats, one Republican). This bill, known as LPS, was advanced in response to pressure from mental health professionals, lawyers, patient’s rights advocates, and the ACLU. When fully implemented in 1972, LPS effectively ended involuntary civil confinement of mental patients in California.

The Democrat-controlled Legislature passed LPS with overwhelming majorities; the vote was 77-1 in the Assembly, and the margin was similar in the Senate. Gov. Reagan signed the bill, but those sound like veto-proof margins to me.

Not surprisingly, our long-on-action, short-on-solutions state Legislature failed to consider and deal with the long term implications of their actions. As a consequence, for the last 40 years there has been little in the way of effective provision for those patients that would, in the past, have been housed in state facilities.

This story was originally published September 14, 2015 at 9:23 AM with the headline "Emptying mental hospitals was a joint decision."