Posts Tagged ‘mental health’

“It was Reagan’s fault.”

This was the expected response to my essay, “The Politics of Mental Health”:

“Ronald Reagan pursued a policy toward the treatment of mental illness that satisfied special interest groups and the demands of the business community, but failed to address the issue: the treatment of mental illness.”

How did he do this?

“Conventional wisdom suggests that the reduction of funding for social welfare policies during the 1980s is the result of a conservative backlash against the welfare state.”

The only problem is that Reagan didn’t cut funding for social welfare …