Yes, it began with the CMHA, but it was under Reagan's presidency that the people who really should not have been de-institutionalized (ie, not the older people with dementia/etc who were returned to their homes and families during the first wave of CMHA, and instead the younger people with very serious mental illness and no support system), were. This is very well documented in the book American Psychosis by Torrey if you're interested in the facts.
As I mentioned above, between my mother and myself, we were there, we lived through the whole period in which the existing system was systematically dismantled and we know the facts from following "current events". My mom's something of a junkie for that, more than a bit of which rubbed off on me; while this was not a major focus of her's, it got her interest when a while after 3 months of residency in a psych ward, she returned to work as an RN Nurse Anesthetist and saw one of her "hopeless" cases doing janitorial or orderly work there. After thousands of years of hopelessness, this was an earthshaking thing.
Sure, some was done after Reagan became president (heck, it continues today, my Missouri Democratic governor is shutting down an institution for the mentally retarded not too far north), but you're going to have to do better than a book published in 2013 that couldn't pass the gatekeepers without blaming it on that devil Reagan.
You're really going to claim that few of the latter, the very ones with the diseases we started effectively treating in the '50s, true miracles that prompted a Federal rethinking of our approach starting in that decade, somehow continued to be warehoused until 1980???
I think this is a case where Wikipedia is not a sufficient source (wonderful though the website is). While I respect you and your mother's experiences, I prefer published evidence over anecdotal. I'll refer you to the book rather than continue this thread: http://goo.gl/yjKGxj
You're confusing two things we're providing witness of:
My mother's anecdotal experience with the revolution of treatment of schizophrenia with anti-psychotics in the '50s, which merely dovetails with the Federal government also recognizing that this deserved a serious rethink of how we treat these formerly "hopeless" cases.
Our non-anecdotal watching of current events as this good impulse was totally botched over the next N decades.
E.g. I suppose it's an "anecdote" that I read not that long ago that the state is shutting down an institution for the mentally retarded a bit to the north of me, but that's not using the word in the way you mean.
Anyway, for us, "published 'evidence'" that per your statements contradicts the facts as we contemporaneously observed them, and for obvious political motives, is less than interesting. Especially when there are so many good, honest accounts of this out there.
