Widespread homelessness among the mentally ill can be traced back to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the influential works of writers such as Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman, Ken Kesey, and R.D. Laing. These authors maintained that sufferers of mental illness were a kind of political prisoner to an unjust social structure and that they were "really just marching to a different drummer and should be free to do their marching in the streets," and so paved the way for the wholesale deinstitutionalization of mentally ill individuals in the U.S. When many of them ended up homeless and alone, posing a danger to themselves and sometimes to others, civil liberties activists "snuffed out any lingering possibility that the state hospitals and the community mental health centers might treat the vast majority of the seriously mentally ill" by reinterpreting their condition of homelessness as a state of emancipation.
It wasn't Ronald Reagan, but the mainstream media hated him so they made sure he ended up with the blame.
"Joyce Patricia Brown (perhaps better known as Billie Boggs) was a homeless person who defeated New York City's efforts to force her into a psychiatric treatment program. Her case set legal precedents for forced psychiatric care which have hamstrung involuntary psychiatric commitments of the homeless in New York and elsewhere.
Robert Levy, a staff attorney from the New York Civil Liberties Union (a state ACLU branch), defended her in court. On January 15, 1988, State Supreme Court Justice Irving Kirshenbaum ruled that New York City could not forcibly medicate Brown. Shortly thereafter, Acting State Supreme Court Justice Robert Lippmann ordered her released, in part because although she was mentally ill, her behavior was not obviously and immediately dangerous to anyone. She was released in late January after about eleven weeks of involuntary commitment and returned to the streets."
Widespread homelessness among the mentally ill can be traced back to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the influential works of writers such as Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman, Ken Kesey, and R.D. Laing. These authors maintained that sufferers of mental illness were a kind of political prisoner to an unjust social structure and that they were "really just marching to a different drummer and should be free to do their marching in the streets," and so paved the way for the wholesale deinstitutionalization of mentally ill individuals in the U.S. When many of them ended up homeless and alone, posing a danger to themselves and sometimes to others, civil liberties activists "snuffed out any lingering possibility that the state hospitals and the community mental health centers might treat the vast majority of the seriously mentally ill" by reinterpreting their condition of homelessness as a state of emancipation.
It wasn't Ronald Reagan, but the mainstream media hated him so they made sure he ended up with the blame.
"Joyce Patricia Brown (perhaps better known as Billie Boggs) was a homeless person who defeated New York City's efforts to force her into a psychiatric treatment program. Her case set legal precedents for forced psychiatric care which have hamstrung involuntary psychiatric commitments of the homeless in New York and elsewhere.
Robert Levy, a staff attorney from the New York Civil Liberties Union (a state ACLU branch), defended her in court. On January 15, 1988, State Supreme Court Justice Irving Kirshenbaum ruled that New York City could not forcibly medicate Brown. Shortly thereafter, Acting State Supreme Court Justice Robert Lippmann ordered her released, in part because although she was mentally ill, her behavior was not obviously and immediately dangerous to anyone. She was released in late January after about eleven weeks of involuntary commitment and returned to the streets."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Patricia_Brown
Basically, the ACLU and the usual left-wing suspects went to court to fight for her right to live in a subway grate and throw her feces at passerby.