reality, it was a Democrat who got the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals rolling. President John F. Kennedy proposed and successfully advocated a crucial 1963 reform that required the federal government to fund community mental health centers but leave it to the states to fund mental hospitals.15 In 1963 President Kennedy argued that medical advances would enable “most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and returned to a useful place in society.”16 The Kennedy White House recommended shifting funding away from mental hospitals to
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