The Aftermath We’re Still Living In
The Aftermath We’re Still Living In
I remember Ronald Reagan.
I was a kid in the 80s, watching the news with my mom in our living room. I didn’t understand policy yet, but I understood consequences. I understood what it looked like when the safety net got pulled out from under people and nobody caught them.
When Reagan closed mental hospitals in the 1980s through deinstitutionalization and budget cuts, the promise was “community care.” The reality was sidewalks. The hospitals shut down, but the community programs were never fully funded. So people with schizophrenia, with bipolar disorder, with trauma that no one knew how to name yet — they landed on the streets.
Mental health never recovered from that.
Not really. Not for us.
I’ve lived it. I was hospitalized in 2023. I’ve been in psych units where the staff are overworked and the beds are full and the discharge plan is “good luck.” I’ve lived with women who cycled from hospital to jail to tent and back again. That cycle got worse for the unhoused population after the 80s, and it never stopped. We didn’t fix it. We just got used to seeing it.
Poor folks stayed poor. Especially men and women of color. The War on Drugs, the cuts to social programs, the dismantling of public housing — it all hit Black and brown communities first and hardest. When you close hospitals and don’t build housing, when you criminalize addiction instead of treating it, when you defund schools and call it “fiscal responsibility,” you don’t create self-reliance. You create generational poverty.
We allowed systematic racism to occur. Not just in the 80s. We let it get written into policy, into budgets, into the places we chose not to look. Redlining became “urban renewal.” Neglect became “personal responsibility.” And when people couldn’t pull themselves up by bootstraps they never had, we called them broken.
Now it’s 2026, and I’m watching it resurface again.
Different president, same playbook. Cuts to Medicaid. Cuts to HUD. Talk of “efficiency” that always seems to mean fewer services for the people who need them most. I see it in my own life — trying to find an apartment with an eviction and a bankruptcy, knowing that one medical bill or one rent increase could put me back on the street. I see it in the faces at Marion County Behavioral Health. I see it in the way we still talk about “the homeless” like it’s a character flaw instead of a policy failure.
The aftermath of having a Republican president like Reagan wasn’t just political. It was personal. It was my neighbors. It was the man at Sun Valley Mall asking for change in 1989 who might have been in a hospital bed ten years earlier.
Deinstitutionalization without community investment didn’t liberate people. It abandoned them. And we’re still paying for it — in emergency rooms, in jails, in tents under overpasses, in the sons and daughters of the people who never got help.
I’m not writing this because I hate a party. I’m writing it because I remember. Because I lived through the 80s and 90s, and I’m living through the echo now. Because when you close a hospital door and don’t open another one, people don’t disappear. They just end up somewhere colder.
We say we believe in family values. But families can’t hold what systems were built to carry.
We say we believe in freedom. But there’s no freedom in untreated psychosis on a sidewalk.
The aftermath isn’t history.
It’s the woman at the shelter who reminds me of my mom.
It’s the kid at Mt. Diablo High today whose dad is unhoused.
It’s me, rebuilding, knowing how thin the line is.
We did this once. We’re doing it again.
And the people paying for it still aren’t the ones who signed the bills.
*Cathrynmharris
