>Why did we let anyone do that wholesale without a pilot program? People will ask that alot about the changes made in our own time. Everything went really weird after Eisenhower. Dems drove most of this "Great Society" transition. The whole country was nudged by media and politicians incrementally to the left each year after that. I think state budget cuts, privatization, liberalism and greed created the transition away from state funded psychiatric institutions. There were many articles about the atrocities discovered in these institutions published back in the 1960s that helped to create a negative public opinion of them.