At that time, we were still close. When we talked on the phone, we would quote some Star Trek line about "Good God Jim, you can't leave him in the hands of 20th Century medicine!"
(Not the quote, but the rescue scene where the good doctor describes chemo as "sounds like the Spanish Inquisition": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMaGnpVaSGQ)
I was in a really nice facility. I was not crazy. I was just a teenager who had been molested and raped by a relative who was not old enough to legally advocate for myself. (it's a long story)
You would need to do better than merely throwing money at the problem and upgrading our current cages to cushy gilded cages for me to feel that it had some hope of being better than sleeping in a tent in the woods on my own recognizance.
"Bars do not a prison make". And gilded bars do not a civilized climate make by any stretch of the imagination.
They changed the law in part because of the horrifying conditions under which people were living who had been committed.
Having slept in a tent for nearly 6 years, I would take that over de facto imprisonment in an asylum any day. I did spend 10 days in an asylum in my teens. This is not an uninformed opinion by any stretch.