The Street Lawyer

The 1980s and 1990s saw a drastic upturn in the amount of people without access to permanent housing, but the roots of that crisis began in the 1960s. In 1963, as part of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Congress passed the Community Mental Health Act (CMHA), a program meant to provide federal funding for community mental health centers and research facilities in the United States. The goal was to stop warehousing psychiatric patients in institutions and mainstream them into the community, while providing existing mental health centers with significant financial support and funding the building of new centers. In turn, the centers could educate families about mental health. Unfortunately, only about half of the promised mental health centers were built, and because of the lack of funding, many social services and welfare programs suffered from budget cuts. Although the CMHA was well-intentioned, one of its main repercussions was the mass deinstitutionalization of patients from state psychiatric hospitals into the community. Because many communities did not have adequate or sustainable support systems, the people who had been released by institutions were forced to live on the streets. In addition, mental health issues still carried a stigma, and not everyone was willing or felt it was their responsibility to accept former psychiatric patients into their neighborhoods and lives.