Thank You Ronnie Raygun

[unhappycamper]

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/14/community-care-disbands-somerville/6X07LnUiTlvcQWEVlrDRTL/story.html



Patients Donna Toscano (left) and Barbara Jean Lingenfeld (right) laughed as they did artwork at the Red House in Somerville last month.

A Somerville community of care disbands
By Felice J. Freyer Globe Staff
March 15, 2016

SOMERVILLE — It took Caitlin Basile many years to find a place where she felt at ease, after spending much of her life cycling in and out of psychiatric hospitals.

Almost a year ago, someone referred her to Riverside Community Care’s day treatment program in Somerville. She hasn’t been in the hospital since.

“There aren’t many places you can go and be treated like a person, where you can share your struggles with people but also just be able to laugh and talk about normal things,” said Basile, a 30-year-old former social worker with hair dyed blue and eyes filled with sadness.

But Friday, that community expects to disband. The treatment program informally known as the Red House is set to shut its doors after decades of serving people with chronic mental illness. The program fell victim to a collision between soaring real estate prices and inadequate funding of mental health care.

--

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan#Presidency_.281981.E2.80.9389.29

Further following his opposition to government intervention, Reagan cut the budgets of non-military[167] programs[168] including Medicaid, food stamps, federal education programs[167] and the EPA.[169] While he protected entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare,[170] his administration attempted to purge many people with disabilities from the Social Security disability rolls.[171]

-

St Ronnie was the person who closed mental health hospitals throwing these folks out on the streets.

MY wife (at the time) had a younger sister with Downs syndrome. The Arlington and Belchertown mental health institutions closed and put those people out on the streets. We were fortunate to find a place near us that we could afford.