I was at a university where feminists campaigned against the old asylums. They complained that most of the mental patients were women and that husbands and male psychiatrists too easily put their wives in mental institutions. University feminists and their associated women’s studies, psychology, social work and nursing departments around the country ended asylums. Ever since, the psychs. hastily prescribe drugs to patients and spit them back out to the streets.
They, or others, succeeded in getting Dorthea Dix closed down and the streets were filled with homeless former mental patients. That was in the early ‘70s. It could be unnerving to wash clothes at the laundromat because many would hang out inside them to get out of bad weather.