Posted on 09/10/2025 10:43:59 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
As an over 50 year resident of California and a history buff, I've been intrigued how quickly the new State of California, at the end of a largely unpopulated and unsettled continent, built insane asylums to care for the mentally ill. The scale, breadth and scope of these institutions in California was incredible. Living in Silicon Valley, we are close to the Agnews State Hospital, one of the first mental hospitals in California.
I find the history instructive because of the heinous murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr. and President Trump's call for building new insane asylums.
Below is a brief history of the California mental hospital example starting with statehood in 1850 when the state was small and relatively poor. I find it amazing and incredible how the new state moved so quickly to build institutions for the mentally ill and criminally insane.
We really lost our way in the 1960s and we are paying a horrible price for it.
“flop houses and boarding houses where a person could get room and board from perhaps an old lady or two”
I stayed in a couple of those in San Francisco in the early 70s when I had a field service job and it wasn’t worth keeping an apartment in SF for the few weeks between jobs during the year. The ones I stayed at were a notch above a flop house - they were called “Guest houses.” You got a small room with a sink, a toilet and shower down the hall, and a communal (i.e., living room) room. I forgot that “urban renewal” destroyed most of those places as well as all of the tenements that were cheap housing.
You listed a lot of the bad things that were done to destroy the lowest-cost housing and de-institutionalized people who needed care.
The federal government has really screwed things up the past 65-70 years when it comes to low-income housing, care, and the flood of drugs.
We just got back from three weeks in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. The last stop on our big tour was a tour of Buckingham Palace. I was absolutely disgusted by the staggering wealth and trappings of “royalty” and the hereditary system that continues that. Oliver Cromwell tried to abolish the royalty and aristocracy long ago but failed.
You listed a lot of the failures from the 1960s to today. But the abolition of involuntary commitment and the turning loose of millions of mentally ill people combined with lax government fighting the scourge of drugs has brought us to the worst possible place imaginable in 2025. Building of mental hospitals, vagrancy laws, and cheap flop houses made the USA a lot more livable in the past. Letting people out of mental hospitals in the name of “compassion” and the federalization of care has been a disaster.
I still find it amazing that the country developed a good (not perfect) solution in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. But “enlightened” modern man destroyed what our ancestors developed and was proven to work.
Those boarding house ladies could sure cook.
I agree with all that you said here. I was in Florida during the “de-institutionalization” Bait & Switch phase for both the State Psychiatric hospitals and the State-run residential facilities for the Developmentally Disabled. I was in grad school at the time, and most my friends worked for the State to find alternative places in the community for the Residents to live. Very noble idea and it was working at first... but as you say, the 1960s changed it all and it was too expensive the way the Bureaucrats set it all up, for failure. Compassion, out the door.
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