Having had a crazy parent, I can sympathize, because there’s really nothing you can do except (a) hope they don’t show up at your house and kill you or your children and (b) hope they don’t die in a gutter somewhere.
Involuntary committals stopped in the 1970s. While involuntary commitment had probably been abused, it was a way of getting treatment for people, and by that time a lot of mental hospitals were on the cottage system and were really very nice places. I had a non-relative (who I had to visit because of my job) who had been committed to a beautiful place in lower Upstate New York, surrounded by great nurses and houseparents...and then the Great State of New York “deinstitutionalized” and sent them all to live in triple decker bunkbeds in the unheated garages of local residents who had opened “half way houses.”
We rescued him from one of these but then the state stopped funding even this level of care and he disappeared.
People like him, however, have killed people and filled up the police and EMS reports, as well as your local ER, for 50 years now. And even if you don’t care about them, think about the cost.
Bizarrely enough, Ronald Reagan was the one who unleashed the mentally ill on California. When he shut down the state mental health residential facilities, he actually said these people could go out and get jobs as playground monitors....
I think Reagan was an excellent president, but on some things, the conservatives and the left came full circle, and he was Governor of CA at that time. The conservatives wanted to save money and the left was screaming the Langian theme that the insane were the only truly sane persons - because they had been driven mad by capitalism.
In reality, the cost of deinstitutionalization - between policing, health care, courtroom costs and lost work hours of persons murdered or severely injured by the mentally ill - has been enormous.
The mentally ill in CA pretty much only get triage, crisis and maintenance services. Most treatment now a days is chemical.
IIRC, JFK got the ball rolling during his administration.
Here in Western PA back in the late 60s I saw what happened to some of these de-institutionalized people they moved into my run down neighborhood.
It was not pretty. The people who came up with the 'group housing' schemes had to be more insane than the patients.
Or they didn't give a s**t.