[crediblewitness]

The comment you are replying to answers your question.

Q. Why as a society have we decided that libraries are where hurting people are to be herded?

A. "...we find the idea of involuntarily committing psychiatric patients to be unpalatable these days..."

[tyingq]

That's sort of right. It's not that we find it morally unacceptable to involuntarily commit people.

It's that we don't want to pay for it. We shut down all the state mental hospitals. Which moved that population to jails, prisons, and the streets.

[alejohausner]

Taxpayers may have thought that mental asylums were expensive, but jails are very expensive. It's a lot cheaper to keep a schizophrenic in a state hospital. So I'm not sure that the decision to empty the state hospitals was driven by taxpayer stinginess.

The whole thing is complicated. Drug companies in the 60s and 70s advertised their antipsychotics very hard. They persuaded the public that drugs could cure mental illness. That was a big force behind the emptying of the hospitals.

Lots of short-sighted thinking.

[tyingq]

The 1965 Medicaid law changes excluded any reimbursement to psychiatric hospitals with more than 16 beds.

That killed the state run hospitals. Running a 16 bed or less facility in a profitable way with Medicare reimbursement isn't possible. The money moved to other social programs.

[CryptoPunk]

Deinstitutionalization was not driven by taxpayers. Taxpayers have been fighting a losing war against growing social spending since 1913, and particularly since 1965. It was sociologists and other social commentators who considered it a form of oppression that drove the movement.