Reagan took all the mental patients who were in asylums and threw them onto the streets in the 1980s. Since then most people with really severe mental illness end up on the streets, due to lack of asylums.
It makes me furious. It hapened to my family. People with severe mental illness were treated better in the 1920s asylums than they were in the 1980s, and it has only gotten a little better since the 1980s.
My SO had just finished the work on her MA in Psych when Reagan did that. (It took her a couple of decades to get the degree because she got seriously ill and didn't finish her thesis in time.) She still rants about what Reagan did.
But being around Psychologists, I've picked up a few things. Among them is the code of ethics for when they take action to take away someone's freedom on Psychological grounds. The criteria is when someone has been determined to be a threat to themselves or others. Before Reagan there were also facilities for people who may not be a threat to themselves or others, but were not capable of taking care of themselves and running a household for whatever particular reason and there was nobody else capable of taking care of them (such as family), so both of these groups ended up out on the streets.
The US and to a large degree Northern Europe today, family unity is often not as strong as in some more traditional cultures. There are upsides and downsides to this many situations where a family will take in a family member in more traditional cultures doesn't happen in these countries. But also a lot of family members who really shouldn't be under the same roof have cultural permission to stay apart rather than a strong cultural meme to stick together no matter what.
I have seen some families who stick to the traditional cultural norm and they end up in constant conflict.
If we were to return to the level of housing the mentally ill we had in 1980 with modern Psychology rules, the only people on the autism spectrum who would be housed in these facilities would be those who are very far over on the spectrum to a point where they struggle to communicate and may become violent with little warning. That obviously would not include anyone in this thread. There also would not be lobotomies or any of the other horrendous things institutions used to do going on. The art/science of Psychology is well beyond that today.
There are many new treatments that have come along that can dramatically help people with severe mental problems that leave them incapacitated, but these treatments must be done in a safe place.
Culturally the entire developed world made some big mistakes starting in the 1980s and it's brought us to the brink. The "greed is good" meme, the embracing of many of Ayn Rand's ideas by the right, stirring up the religious right about reproductive rights, and the end of the Cold War all unleashed a lot of ills.
The end of the Cold War in itself was a good thing, but we screwed up the peace. Russia instead of being brought into the rest of the world was allowed to be taken over by tyrants, and some differences in the west that had been suppressed instead of dealt with because of the Cold War started coming out. The legacy of Reagan was to pit the Republicans as someone's enemy. When the big bad commies were gone, they turned on the left instead of pivoting to a rational right of center party. When the Cold War was over, the left was happy to bury hatchets and move on, but the right needed a fight to keep winning elections instead of new ideas that might appeal to people.
The US wasn't alone in all this. Margaret Thatcher's UK unleashed some similar demons. The EU was not a terrible idea in general, but it too has flaws that have come to light in the last 10 years between the debt crisis and Brexit.
Europe had its far right groups, but the unleashing of the far right in the US gave European far right groups permission to start making noise too. The pressures on Europe to allow non-white immigrants in due to low birth rates as well as the instability in Africa and the Middle East driving refugees into Europe gave the far right groups a focus.
I see too many parallels between the world today and the 1930s to be comfortable. There are a lot of differences, but the way relations between different groups of people are calcifying is a similar pattern. It's unlikely, but there are forces in the US that could make the US the Germany in the modern repeat of the scenario. The US has a much stronger legal tradition, but it's being pushed to the limits. McConnell's push to ram through as many judges as possible is very unsettling. He seems desperate to get it done before something happens in the near future.