Nice try, but it won’t hold up. Ronald Reagan’s budget proposals specifically targeted the provisions of the 1980 Mental Health Systems Act, among other things, for funding cuts. Likewise, Bush’s budget proposals as recently as 2008 specifically targeted the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for cuts.
Yes, conservative leaders are still actively including mental health services among their direct targets for cost-cutting. The most egregious recent example is the budget proposal of Republican governor Sam Brownback to entirely defund the Kansas Neurological Institute. Conservative legislators in, e.g., Virginia and Texas are proposing similar cuts in to mental-health expenditures in state budgets.
Sure, care for the mentally ill is merely one of dozens of social service efforts that conservatives want to cut out of the government on the plea of saving taxpayers money. But it’s no use pretending that the conservatives are somehow just innocently trying to reduce over-spending in general and the mental health services are accidentally getting defunded without their being aware of it.
They’re deliberately specifying particular mental health services and organizations as targets for budget cuts. They know exactly what they’re doing.