Reagan did not create homelessness by emptying the asylums
By Thomas M. Sipos
web posted April 14, 2025
For over thirty years I've been hearing that Ronald Reagan, while governor of California (1967-75), created the homeless crisis by throwing the mentally ill out of institutions and onto the streets. Not only is this canard continually repeated, but it's grown. Recently I heard talk radio show caller complain that President Reagan created homelessness (presumably throughout America) by emptying the asylums.
It's true that in 1967 California ended forced institutionalization of the mentally ill. But the 1960s progressive counter-culture, and the state legislature. had more to do with that than did Reagan.
In The Fresno Bee (Sept. 15, 2022), Tom Balch writes:
"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."
And so you see, the bill was passed by veto-proof majorities in a Democratic legislature. Reagan had no legal authority to stop it. Had he ignored the law once it was passed, progressives would have denounced him as "a threat to democracy."
As for the cultural milieu, well, it was the Sixties, and there was "something in the air" back then. The mentally ill were romanticized as "free spirits" who marched to a different drummer. Asylums were demonized as prison camps tasked with enforcing societal conformity.
For instance, in 1961, Thomas Szasz's well-received book, The Myth of Mental Illness, challenged the authority and expertise of the psychiatric profession, and the very notion of "mental illness."
The film, David and Lisa (1962), depicted the romance between a young couple in an asylum. The asylum was not portrayed as evil, but neither was it helpful. Only David and Lisa's mutual love and understanding could help each other get well.
A darker perspective appeared that same year in Ken Kesey's best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which portrayed forced institutionalization as inhumane. In 1963, Dale Wasserman adapted the novel into a play. The 1975 film version won five Academy Awards.
This attitude toward forced institutionalization became so widespread that by the 1970s, the story of a sane person involuntarily committed to a "snake pit" asylum was a staple of horror, exploitation, and TV movies.
Governor Reagan was but a small cog in a progressive, counter-cultural zeitgeist that, along with the ACLU, was combating forced institutionalization. And for better or worse, the progressives (and libertarians) won. In 1967 California ended forced institutionalization.
Yes, it came with a price. Some patients never belonged in an institution. But some can't survive outside of one. They end up homeless. But you can't pin the blame entirely, or even mostly, on then Governor Reagan. 
Thomas M. Sipos writes satirical novels and film criticism. His website is CommunistVampires.com.
