You'd be surprised how many people in California are "totally disabled." And it was probably easier to qualify 30+ years ago than it is now.ATD was a fund for the 'totally disabled' in California during the '60s and '70s. I don't think that's it.
Indeed, at the end of the 1960s, California and New York, moving rapidly toward an emphasis on community care, began to use the federal-state welfare program Aid to the Disabled (ATD, 1950-1974) to support indigent alcoholics and addicts in local settings much as it provided a non-institutional subsistence to poor persons with severe mental illness.