1. A number of people looked at the success of psychiatric first aid stations for helping soldiers during World War II who were suffering from combat fatigue and decided that what worked well for sane people in an insane situation would work just as well for insane people in a sane world. Hence, the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963, which was part of the campaign to close public mental hospitals.
2. The ACLU put a young attorney named Bruce J. Ennis in charge of one of their mental health projects in 1969. Ennis didn't know anything about mental illness, except what he found from reading a book by Thomas Szasz--a psychiatrist who by his own admission has never treated a psychotic, even when he was in residency training--and believes that schizophrenia does not exist. Ennis decided that the goal was to make involuntary commitment almost impossible--and he came very close to succeeding.
3. A bunch of sociologists decided in the early 1960s that mental hospitals made people crazy--not that crazy people were placed in mental hospitals. (I'm serious--they were convinced that the institutional nature of a mental hospital caused the behavior of the people that were locked up there.)