> The effort will involve hospitalizing people involuntarily, even if they do not pose an immediate risk of harm to others.
>“The common misunderstanding persists that we cannot provide involuntary assistance unless the person is violent,” Mr. Adams said. “This myth must be put to rest. Going forward, we will make every effort to assist those who are suffering from mental illness and whose illness is endangering them by preventing them from meeting their basic human needs.”
How does this work with federal US Supreme Court rulings such Connor Donaldson and Addington Texas:
It works like this: there are no Constitution Police. No one gets arrested for making an unconstitutional law.
NYC especially is pretty good at this: they make a law, it works through the system and gets struck down by SCOTUS, then they immediately make a slightly different law which has to work through the system and be struck down.
It’s way quicker to make a law than it is to strike it down. Ultimately, if the people of a region keep electing lawmakers who make unconstitutional laws, that region will have unconstitutional law most of the time.
Thank you for explaining this to everyone. As someone who is disabled with Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and suffered the horrors of today's for profit psychiatric hospitals this is not only unlawful but is a disgusting money grab that Adams no doubt will profit from at some point.
Is a law that will, in the future, be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court unconstitutional before they find it to be so?
Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to view this phenomenon within the context of the balanced powers of government? The Supreme Court has the final say in the constitutionality of a certain law, but that doesn’t make them the most powerful branch of government. They lack the power to try again, and the legislature and the executive have that power.
To me, the system is working as intended when the people elect representatives who repeatedly force the judicial branch to strike down laws the people want. This seems to be a way to redirect this type of question into a political solution, i.e., a way to force people to recognize that what they really want is not a particular law, but a better judiciary or a center Constitution.
After all, the chain of events you’re describing is one that never departs from the mechanisms considered by the Constitution (and the Marbury court, of course, but that ship has sailed).
The problem is that there’s no disincentive to creating laws that are eventually found unconstitutional — a malicious actor is capable of producing ill-formed laws faster, cheaper and with less effort than it takes to identify and remove them. So responsibility isn’t really the issue — the problem is that you can simply overwhelm the other party to make them impotent, and impossible to execute on that responsibility (because if they double their resources, you produce 4X the garbage).
Ideally you would have lawmakers incentivized to produce laws, that upon review, are constitutional, but it remains the supreme court’s jurisdiction to determine that constitutionality.
Like try spamming the FDA drugs unlikely to pass scrutiny — they’ll just shut you out — so you’re incentivized to try to submit something reasonably likely to pass.
I get what you’re saying but I think we approach this from different philosophies (which is fine).
I agree that there is no disincentive to passing laws that the judiciary will nullify (other than the fact they get nullified and have to be replaced). The “malicious actor” of whom you speak appears to me to be the representative of the populace, from whom all power derives, and accordingly I see this as a feature, not a bug. The only incentive they should need to pass useful laws is re-election.
My ideal would be that the courts would interpret and make law, but that political questions like “what comports with the Constitution” would be solved at the ballot box, in the legislature, or with the veto pen, as was intended.
The idea that the judicial branch could be made “impotent” via repeated passing through the duly empowered legislature of bills signed by the duly empowered executive seems like exactly the right amount of power for what was considered by Article III. The courts are, after all, currently the strongest part of our constitutional system.
I don't know much about case law but seemed that in both cases there must be burden of proof that they are a harm to themselves or others. From my time in SF I have seen more people than I can count walking around with blood and feces caked on their legs. I could see someone like that requiring instituional help.
> ruling that a state cannot constitutionally confine a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by themselves or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.
The non-paywalled portion of the article
> Mayor Eric Adams directed the police and emergency medical workers to hospitalize people they deemed too mentally ill to care for themselves, even if they posed no threat to others.
These seem to be the same standard, they are confining people who incapable of caring for themselves, which O'Connor v. Donaldson apparently allowed.
The only difference might be "with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends" but the reality is if someone has help and is accepting it, the police won't even know about it.
They only get involved when those family members and friends call them directly, or the person is found wandering around.
Yeah. I'm also willing to give the city the benefit of the doubt and assume that that small caveat is being taken care of properly and just wasn't included in the quote in the subtitle of the NY times article...
How narrowly defined will "care" be? Can a man choose to be homeless? Does that mean he "can't care for himself" and should be imprisoned in a mental hospital or asylum of some kind?
Being homeless doesn't cut it. Not being aware enough to seek shelter from rain or snow might - that would put them literally at risk of physical harm due to their own inability to avoid it. Shelter doesn't need to be a house, it can be an underpass with tents/sleeping bags etc. If you are trying to stay warm and the sleeping bag is not warm enough that would be considered lack of resources, not lack of mental capability.
On an individual level, I think homeless people who are in obviously poor health (pervasive sores, immobility, etc) would meet the metric. I would also say that many with mental issues who behave unpredictably are ipso facto a danger to others if people feel endangered by them. That may not warrant immediate involuntary detention, but evaluation.
On an aggregate level, I would say two things: 1) I assume most people who are homeless did not choose to be homeless with sound mind and free will. If I am right, then we should do what we can to get them off the streets if they are sane and willing, and take them off the streets involuntarily if they are in decrepit health or are in any way violent.
2) Let's say most of the homeless were living the vagabond life. I asserr there exists a limit on the sustainable homeless population in any community or city. At some point, when do cities say "no you can't shit in the bushes in the park, no you can't have entire parks taken over as makeshift campsites, no we will not tolerate IV drug use which litters our streets"?
More needs done, out of compassion and out of necessity for the housed community.
Sounds like nothing more than a publicity stunt, given that no additional funding is being made available for taking care of the people they plan on detaining. They'll just grind through the existing under-funded, over-crowded, barely-functional system of prisons and psych wards and hospitals.
New York operates differently - this won't hit the courts, and the local Federal circuit court is essentially an arm of the state. MAYBE the Feds could get involved, but I'm willing to bet they let this run for a bit to see if it helps. The status quo is awful, and all alternative proposals seem to start with "once we dismantle capitalism,..." which is not going to happen.
This is imprisonment without conviction, no matter how you gussy it up.
It's unsurprising. NYC elected a cop as mayor, and his only idea for solving the city's problems is more policing. It hasn't worked in the past, and it won't work now, but the media and real estate classes here keep demanding it anyway.
The alternative is these people continue to live and die on the street without care where they are frequently targeted for exploitation or abuse, not freedom
I would agree with you if I did not experience the "care" they calling to provide in these psychiatric for-profit hospitals. Let me tell you about abuse...
Why not just give these people free housing with assisted care on location? If we can survive on the street we can surly survive in a residential setting.
What will happen is they they will pump us full of drugs to sedate us and just keep sucking money out of the state and federal government so that these hospital owners can buy another house in Bermuda.
On the street gang members might force you to pimp yourself or sell drugs, and use your addiction to meth or fentanyl or threats to your life as their hold over you. They might light your tent on fire with you in it.
For these people who have severe mental illness, free housing with assisted care on location looks a lot like a mental institution. Without oversight they are liable to walk out of care and be back on the street. For some homeless, that's how they are on the street today. They might have gotten a delusion that leads them from disappearing from their families, and sometimes they find them years later living on the streets in a state of complete dissociation with reality, other times they never find them.
I hope you can appreciate how little value this kind of comment adds. I used to work with someone who would make this exact comment "surely there must be X" in discussions, and it is far less helpful than saying nothing. Either you have an option, or a criticism or some other insight, or you have nothing to add. "surely" means nothing.
Without federal action for adequate funding for adequate mental healthcare providers nationwide, I do not see what other choice any state/county/city in the US could have.
Same with healthcare or housing or any other population wide benefit policy where benefit recipients can migrate in and net payers into the system can migrate out.
It's getting help when they are mentally incapable of getting help for themselves. Do you honestly believe letting them suffer on the streets is better for them? If so, you're a monster.
> many homeless (not all) that menace pedestrians and businesses on a daily basis?
Houses.
You see, the answer is simple but there is just no will to do it because people do not care about the mentally ill. We scare people for no reason but their own ignorance. I would say 90% of the mentally ill would have a great remission of their symptoms if they had stable housing.
I am homeless, all I need is a simple fcking studio but even making a lot of money from disability I cannot afford one anymore and I get shut down by people who do not want to rent to me because I am on diability.
Maybe it’s a dumb question, but why don’t you find 2 or 3 other people in your same situation and pool resources as roommates? 4 disability checks might be enough to allow you to afford a better home and landlord?
Poor people who are not mentally ill often do exactly that. Even some drug addicts can sometimes get together to rent a place to crash. But we're talking about the severely mentally ill here. They are unable to band together. I imagine that this is sort of by definition... those who's mental illness illness is mild enough that they can help themselves by working together... just do it. The remaining are on the streets.
Can we agree that different people have different urgent needs? I agree with you that you need a house. A mentally unstable person who can’t take care of themselves needs mental help. A person with hard drug addiction destroying them needs physical and mental help. Not all problems can be solved with free housing, just like not all problems can be solved with involuntary hospitalization.
> You see, the answer is simple but there is just no will to do it because people do not care about the mentally ill.
That is unfair, as it implying that throwing houses at the problem will magically fix it. Houses would help, for some (many) cases, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Nor is it simple to supply those houses, and lack of doing so isn't just "not caring". It's hard. It's really hard.
> NYC elected a cop as mayor, and his only idea for solving the city's problems is more policing
I don't notice much difference with him compared to de Blasio, except de Blasio was universally not liked. Adams is better but surprisingly by not much.
> It hasn't worked in the past
Considering the 70s were a complete mess & a generation afterwards it didn't feel like that, whatever happened in-between seems to have improved things. And that improvement definitely did come from police to some degree.
Crime was at a historic low until recently with the advent of "defund."
Except few places have defunded their police. I would bet NYC has not. In many places it seems the cops are somewhere between understaffed and simply pouting and not doing their job unless it's exciting. Anecdote: I had about $2,500 of electronics stolen from my car on video in a parking lot, and the cop did not go back to check for full footage or imply anything would be done about it. Didn't even check to see if there were plates in the back of the car!
By the way, "defund" was also about using some paramilitary police funding to fund social services and mental health calls like the ones that may be dealing with the people in this discussion.
Finally, recall that "defund" kicked off at the same time as a global pandemic and major economic shock, an affordable housing shortage, a wage shortage and a drug epidemic.
> the cops are somewhere between understaffed and simply pouting and not doing their job unless it's exciting
so are you pro-worker or not (I suspect you are pro-worker), cause it sounds like you're hashing out anti-worker rhetoric against your enemies
I hear this all the time from ppl, it's this automatic talking point that cops don't do their job, so we should just push dangerous slogans like defund - when cops are desperately needed in actually dangerous neighborhoods. It's a very privileged sentiment.
There is a difference between an actual strike with specific demands, and "quiet quitting" as a police officer. What do police demand? From their unions, it seems they just want continued immunity from murder charges when they negligently kill citizens.
If the rail workers threatening a strike had a history of disabling crossing guards on railroad crossings to hit cars without warning, and their union didn't want conductors to get fired for that, I'd be against the railroad union, too.
Again, "defund", this scary slogan, attempted to wrap a lot of ideas up, most of which did not directly mean "eliminate the role of law enforcement". And, like I said and you failed to refute, substantial police budget cuts are quite sparse. So what's dangerous besides something that hasn't happened? What's dangerous other than cops quiet quitting to protest things that haven't happened?
The problem of course is public sector unions. Even FDR (one of the biggest union icons) thought the idea of a public sector union is dysfunctional nonsense, it makes no sense that they should exist.
Public sector employees are represented by the public in voting. The idea that they should bargain with the public is ridiculous when they are the public elected by the public. Any additional "protection" will dangerously insulate them from reform & accountability to the will of the public.
Public sector unions are fundamentally anti-democratic.
With a union, they're able to hold other citizens hostage. It's disgraceful and exactly why they're able to get humongous budgets for doing nothing, as you seem to admit.
Mind you this happens with teachers and other public sector employees. Pretty much inevitably.
Of course, the people who get up-in-arms about police never extend their logic to their own sacred cows.
A debate on the utility of public unions would be interesting to me, you being up a good point.
We should probably nationalize our railroads, too, but that's a different discussion.
We've gone off the rails (!) but we might agree more than disagree. My stances:
Homelessness: housing needs to be more affordable, income inequality should be reduced through progressively higher taxes, and funding for mental healthcare and public safety should be increased.
Cops: major reforms required but they are a necessity in society.
Unions: reasonable for private sector, debatable for public sector, dangerous in the case of law enforcement.
Oh, and the root of our failures in government is the two party system which lowers morale for the public, promotes political extremism and encourages fear-based politicking instead of solution -based politicking.
Crime is still lower than it was a decade ago. And as another comment pointed out, almost no City in the US defunded the police. NYC certainly did not.
> This is imprisonment without conviction, no matter how you gussy it up.
This is begging the question. You have to explain why you think that's bad, not merely describe what's happening.
Obviously you're assuming a shared sense that it's illegitimate to intern someone without a trial, but the whole point here is that some people think an exception should be made in this particular case. You're just reiterating the controversy.
> This is imprisonment without conviction, no matter how you gussy it up.
We could force the state to put these people in front of a judge or jury if you prefer. California does--and my experience is that these people seem to get reasonable aggressive representation from the state.
It unfortunately won't change much.
There aren't enough beds--that's the simple truth. So, this isn't going to put even a dent into the situation.
This is sensationalism. There are people letting themselves rot on the streets, it's more than an inconvenience to the society, it's a danger to themselves. They're not going to voluntarily do anything in many cases.
The trope about "the Mayor is a former cop" makes for good political talking points but it's meaningless otherwise. In what way has NYC become any different since Adams took the helm?
Perhaps I am revealing my age, but the common narrative from the old times is that involuntary hospitalization was once common in America. This took the form of sanitariums, which in popular media now have a horrible reputation. Sometime around the 70s and 80s this system was dismantled for financial and legal reasons. Is this how those who lived this period see it? That we took a flawed system and replaced it with street anarchy?
There was another story on HN yesterday about Hospice care. So if you take babies, children, mentally ill people, and dying people what percentage of society needs to be protected in some form or another?
There were social reasons and developments in psychopharmacology as well -- this Wikipedia page [0] on deinstitutionalization in the US might be worth a quick read or skim.
There's also a WP page on the history of deinstitutionalization world-wide [1]. It starts from the 19th century, talking about sanitariums and what happened with them.
> They can just call someone "too" mentally ill and lock them up?
Yes. Thats how it worked for over 100 years in the US, until the 1980s. I remember being shocked to learn this too, being too young to remember such a time. The “funny farm” was a real place.
But the alternative is what we have now. Where every major city in the country has thousands of deranged psychotic people roaming the streets, completely unmedicated or cared for, until they inevitably cause harm to themselves or someone else.
Homelessness (which often, but not always, goes hand in hand with mental illness) is an epidemic in NYC (as well as other cities) and should be treated as such.
Instead of waiting to build homes, which are shot down by the NIMBY folk or find more psych beds, cities need to take more aggressive measures. During the height of the pandemic, the Javits Center was going to essentially be used as a hospital. That level of thinking is going to be required to address the situation cities face today. Ships. Shipping containers (a la Qatar). Everything should be on the table. Combine this with security, aides, some level of nursing care and telemedicine psychiatry, with medication delivery.
It can be done. Requires the willpower to do it.
You have NO idea what it is like in these hospitals. NO IDEA. It is safer and healthier to live on the street.
The solution is easy bu they truth is no one cares. No one cares about the mentally ill homeless. No one. I know this because I ma mentally ill and homeless now for four years. People would rather make bank off an AirBnB than rent it to me for half the price and still make it so I am paying of f half their mortgage. It is just greed, simple greed, with everyone.
I am not even asking for much, a simple studio, but no one cares, so I get worse and worse and then you will all pay SO MUCH MORE when I am in the hospital and medicare has to pay for my $10,000 a week hospitalization.
You want an Airbnb owner to subsidize your rent to the tune of half of their unit’s mortgage cost, when they could pay the entire mortgage as it is?
Maybe they cannot afford to carry half a mortgage? Maybe you should not expect them to?
> Mayor Eric Adams directed the police and emergency medical workers to hospitalize people they deemed too mentally ill to care for themselves
Huh. Every now and again, I'll think that I basically understand the broad strokes of the US political system reasonably well for someone who doesn't live there.
Then I learn that mayors can section people, which surely takes time away from core mayoral duties like opening supermarkets.
I have schizophrenia and have been involuntarily hospitalized in the past. For the love of god, if I end up homeless and unable to care for myself do not leave me there out of some notion of how freeing it must be to lie in the gutter with your teeth rotting out of your face! Hospitals suck but being ill is worse, being homeless is worse, being too ill to get off the streets is worse.
If someone asks and you say no, what do you want them to do? IMO if someone would rather be in a gutter with their teeth rotting out than in an institution, that's their prerogative if they can do it without aggressing upon others.
The problem is that this hypothetical person is severely mentally ill. And thus not rational. This means their answer to the question cannot be taken at face value. You write, "if someone would rather"... as if they will hold the same opinion after the same after treatment as before. If asked again after a course of treatment, they may opt to be released. Or they may be incredibly thankful for the intervention.
IMO, what you're saying is analogous to "if someone suffering from clinical depression wants to kill themselves, let them." I vote no. Please think about it a bit.
I don't think their should be a court of rationality. You should have the right to be irrational, including the right to commit suicide because sad face or a lizard looked at you wrong, if you can do it without aggressing upon others. Your body, your choice.
I don't know if it's some extreme libertarianism or just pure lack of compassion. Some people need - and deserve - help. "Your body, your choice" is just an all-around horrible argument to use for justifying suicide due to mentally or emotionally compromised state.
It's not the offering of help I take issue with. It's the use of force/violence to impose it, most especially in cases where there is no criminal wrongdoing.
Personally I find your stance far more judgmental than mine; no one needs to 'justify' to someone else why they will or will not commit suicide. It's not even for me to justify or not when someone else does that and I reject your allegation I've done so.
Have you ever faced a person cutting their veins in a psychotic episode? I have. Saying that it's OK to let them bleed out because they refuse help is an asinine, inhumane position. It seems you are speaking from a very disconnected theoretical standpoint, ignoring the vastness of extreme human conditions.
I imagine that was a traumatic experience for you. Trauma has been known to make people make irrational and poor choices.
I can't honestly say I know that living in a psychosis (medicated or not) is always better than dying. I defer that judgement to the owner of the body contemplating suicide. Personally no I would not stop the bleeding if asked not to, whether their choice was rational or not. I believe consent and personal choices trump my feelings or trauma from past experiences, even if it turns out the choice of others may be misplaced.
So this isn't meant at all to provide an analogy, as it's a different circumstance. But I'm curious about your personal opinion. Someone has curable cancer (but definitively imminently fatal), but they irrationally reject treatment saying "the stars aren't aligned properly for it" or some nonsense like that. OK to tie them down and cut out the cancer? I'm always curious where people draw the line for when force is ok to use to make someone do the 'better' or more life-giving thing.
It would be odd indeed if it was OK to stop the dying only if they intentionally performed the action that led to their (imminent) death, but not OK to stop the dying if it was caused by something like a disease.
Do you completely refuse to accept that there is such a phenomenon as mental illness? If you are of a sound mind and want to starve to death - have it your way. If you are a schizophrenic lying face down on the street - there is something we can do to help you. It's possible with the help of modern medicine to give you a decent life, restore your function.
What is this theoretical individual losing if we help them? What is the society losing if we act to help?
The dictator part in me, if given the ability, would wave a magic wand and make these individuals 100% neurotypical for 24 hours. At the end of the time, I would ask them if they want to (1) wave the wand again and stay this way as long as they like (2) Go back to their <diagnosed disease> self or (3) commit suicide. I don't know what the answer would be, but I imagine the vast majority would pick (1), a few would pick (2) and a few would pick (3). From that point on, I would defer their suicide decisions to themselves.
Sadly that is not the reality we live in. The dictator, in this case is New York and various government entities. A government notorious for putting mentally ill in wards where people are "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo." [0] Without magic wands, the doctors are not always returning them to neurotypical condition, but rather often some other, perhaps clinically more palatable often drug-induced different mental state. There is often no neurotypical state the wand can be waved to, and often the decision for suicide overlaps between "ill" ad not ill persons particularly when they're subjected to indefinite stays in facilities under conditions of sexual abuse such as historically found in New York mental wards. Hell I might argue it may be cruel to stop someone from committing suicide to avoid being "helped" by New York.
That is, we are dealing with gritty, dirty reality where the mentally ill entity that is the state of New York, itself unqualified in its mental facilities, has a history of sexually and physically abusing people [0, but that's not all] to "protect" them from their own mental illness/suicide etc. Even if the consent argument fails on merits (I disagree), I argue the decision cannot and should not rest on the state in non-criminal concerns of imposing force on the ill (and notwithstanding the dystopic notion of government entities choosing who meets often poorly defined mental diseases).
With the state totally unqualified, and the individual on his own on the street often with family far removed, I defer to his perhaps ill consent. Notwithstanding, of course all help that can be offered should be.
On the surface that seems like a solid argument - but I think there are some key differences when comparing a situation where a cancer patient refuses surgery and somebody with mental illness refuses help getting their lives in shape.
For a start surgery is clearly a much more invasive and risky operation, and even if successful at removing the cancer, can leave the patient in a physically weakened/dependent state for some period of time. It also clearly requires highly-trained specialists to perform the operation and can only be done in controlled environs (operating theatre etc.). If there were any suggestion this were true for providing assistance for the severely mentally ill, then I'd be more inclined to agree with you that there's no good justification for imposing such treatment without their express consent. As it is, I certainly agree that there needs to be a strong system of checks and balances for any such scenario, including time-limits over how long it's legal to hold somebody against their will.
As it is, we don't let dementia patients simply do whatever they like even if they initially consented to entering a care facility, but then no longer want to stay there (which is not uncommon). Whether it's a duty-of-care argument, or simply that doing so would result in too much risk to others, at some point we have to accept even grown adults are no longer capable of rational/informed consent, and we do actually have doctors trained in making such diagnoses.
I think the gulf between opinions here is I see adulthood (and fundamentals like ability to do as you please to your own body) as irrevocable until at least a crime against a (not yourself) victim has been performed. Ideally I would live in a society where people have agreed to such, in practice I've just tried to move to places where the least number of people such as my counterparty above exist so as to reduce my exposure to such impositions of violence. In practice I've ended up in fairly rural western states where individualism is highly preserved, you can do things like buy weed without a card or carry a gun without a license and hell even be senile/demented/schizophrenic at the same time as both and as long as you don't fuck with anyone else people tend to not impose anything on you -- notwithstanding no such place perfectly does this and you'll no doubt find horrible counterexamples where this didn't play out.
I do not think the alternative society that say maximizes certain utilities at the cost of consent is wrong per se as long as it's possible to freely enter/exit such a society, I just find it incompatible with my values. While I disagree with the notion of stopping someone who has asked his/her respects to be honored in regard to suicide, I don't think it's some moral failing if a private individual makes an in-the-moment reaction to stop them. It's pretty much human instinct to try to preserve innocent life of those around us, so hopefully it hasn't been read that I think you're a bad person or something if you see someone cutting themselves and you stop them.
No. Refusing treatment for some cancers might be a sign of mental illness, though not definitive proof. Testicular cancer, for example, is highly amenable to treatment. Whereas pancreatic cancer is not. Refusing treatment for pancreatic cancer is entirely rational - the chances of a cure are almost nil unless it's caught incidentally during another procedure and can be surgically removed.
Society has a responsibility to step in and provide help to those who are so mentally ill they're going to end up homeless. Both for the individual, and society. If you're so mentally ill that you're choosing to end up in a gutter with your teeth rotting out, you are not mentally fit to make that decision.
Enjoy the generous 'help' New York provides when they operate an expanded system of wards:
Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo" and offered a series of recommendations for improving conditions.
...
Shortly thereafter, in early 1972, Geraldo Rivera, then an investigative reporter for WABC-TV in New York, conducted a series of investigations at Willowbrook uncovering a host of deplorable conditions, including overcrowding, inadequate sanitary facilities, and physical and sexual abuse of residents by members of the school's staff.
It's a far off memory now, but it turns out these are the conditions New Yorkers choose when they create these kind of expanded wards, which ultimately resulted in them being shut down. It's no wonder so many might choose their teeth rotting out in a gutter over this help.
The problem I've personally seen is that we live in a society that will happily force situations on others "for their own good", but will actively fight against helping those of us who are literally losing their minds due to their teeth rotting out of their heads who desperately want help but cannot get it because we fall in some shitty "grey zone" where we have enough money to (barely) survive, but not enough to afford the medical care we so desperately need / want. I personally want nothing more in life than to get back to doing the various computer related work I've done and enjoyed most of my life, but at this stage I'm so mentally fucked up that I literally can not and I can't find the basic simple help I've needed desperately for decades now, and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to recover from the long-term damage done by the constant literal agony of my daily waking nightmare (the two to four hours of sleep I get on good nights, etc). Truth is that I'm probably not far off from ending up in a gutter myself at this point, all due to a run of bad luck starting with a broken tooth (and a couple other medical issues that were minor at the time). Fuck this world and the humans that created the society that poisons it for allowing these sorts of things to happen entirely out of greed and ignorance. I truly do look forward to the coming entirely human created apocalypse we're so hell-bent on having. At least I can die knowing we won't be escaping the planet to poison / destroy other amazing planets with our hatred and greed.
You have already heard all the unsolicited opinions and suggestions from people who have no fucking clue what you're going through or what 6oige been through. You have been told "just do X, Y, Z" and have been given countless resources both local and national that others think would help you. You tried contacting a few and they were too demanding, demeaning, or discriminating.
You spent a lot of time learning helplessness even as you became self sufficient to the best of your ability. It wasn't enough either way. Nobody wanted to help you, they just wanted to tell you that they want to, and you discovered that you don't even want their help anyway because it comes with caveats and requirements that you simply cannot tolerate or meet.
You found a way to stay connected and survive despite all this. You know you can take care of yourself. You know you are worth someone's effort and time, but you can't find that someone. Every time you think you do, they fuck you over in some way.
The tiny things added up. A broken this, a missed that, a forgotten something by someone. Dominoes fell. There are plenty of individuals at fault but it's mostly the systems, or The System. The World Should Be Better, but it's not. People are assholes, churches and charities are grifters, there's no hope for those who proffer hope. You're right.
You're right. You're on your own. You're better than all of them.
Workin' on it to the best of my ability. 'Tis taking far longer than I'd hoped, and all the while the pain and lack of sleep drives me slowly insane… It's a race against time, and so far time is winning. Ah well… Live alone, die alone, even surrounded by 8 billion others… C'est la vie…
When I was in school there was this homeless guy that moved into a small storage room on the ground floor of the dorm, around the back somewhere. He's had the whole thing going on, matted hair and beard, dirty clothes, shoes falling apart, rot on his shins, piles and piles of crap in "his" storage room and he slept in the middle of it.
He was allowed to go on like this for years because his brother was very wealthy and was generous with the school administrators.
My last year there, the dorm was slated to be torn down and replaced with a much larger one.
His brother had to come and take him away.
A few months later I saw him sitting on a bench and he looked like a completely different person. Clean shaven, put together. He told me the time he spent living in the storage closet was horrible and he wished his brother had forced him into treatment years earlier.
The moral of the story is people should be forced to do things without their consent if they'll be healthier/better for it?
I find myself utterly incompatible in living in such a society and I've spent much of my life seeking other people and locations that eschew such violence
No, the moral of the story is that just like you wouldn't allow a 4 year old to choose his own bed time or to eat candy for dinner, you also shouldn't let someone with compromised mental faculties make decisions about living in storage rooms.
The legal position of starting off as a free person and having that taken away is not at all analogous to one of someone who starts out as an unfree person (child) and has (or hasn't) reached self agency. Pretty disingenuous analogy, and even then we're ignoring the contextual differences typical present between mother/father/guardian and a government apparatus. This is seen time and time again, for example the burden for a parent to not have their kid removed is not at all the same as the burden to get your kid back from state custody. That is the decision making path (grant agency to non-free person vs don't remove agency to free person) is not symmetrical in either direction as you mistakenly suggest towards.
Also If we're going by someone with compromised mental faculties, I would say an organization (state of New York) who physically and/or sexually abuses the disabled* is not fit to make these decisions. The New York State government has proven themselves to have compromised mental faculties and thus unable to make these decisions to violently/forcibly institutionalize the portion of 'mentally ill' adults who don't aggress upon others. In part New York paired down their institutions because they were such terrible places for these people to be, often worse than in the gutter with teeth rotting.
IMO even the disabled, especially if they are not acting in a criminal capacity, should be asked for their consent before violently being forced into institutions of physical and sexual abuse for which New York is known.
*grep for my below comment about Willowbrook State School where we discover the (mentally disabled) children you worry so much about are actually abused by New York when institutionalized.
Why does the order matter in "has (or hasn't) reached self agency"? Brain is an organ - you seem to agree that child's brain is under-developed and may lack sufficient "self agency". Adult's can be destroyed in various degrees from 0 to irreversible coma. At some point you have to draw a line and say - "this brain is too underdeveloped/damaged, it doesn't have sufficient self agency".
You don't draw child's line at merely being to express their desires, why would you do so for an adult?
I think New York State should also require the consent of children before institutionalizing them for non-criminal matters. The history of New York state suggests they are child abusers and mentally unfit to make decisions to forcibly institutionalize the non-criminal mentally ill.
If I were a child of sufficient age to express desires I would rather beg in the streets in a state of psychosis than be in the institutions such as New York's Willowbrook State School.
Children can express desires at 3, maybe earlier. At least single-noun desires, such as wanting all the candy, followed by a tantrum. Should there be some intervention, or should a 2-3 year old be allowed to have all the candy?
In any case, it's shifting the goalposts. Now we are talking about particular states depriving people from agency, in the previous comment you were talking about a mentally unwell person being categorically entitled to their agency...
I personally think it's a two way street, with 2 inflection points. If someone depends on welfare state in any significant degree, it should be valid to deprive them of a little bit of agency, since it's sorta indicative of them not being capable of good decisions. Kinda like teenagers in the child analogy. If someone depends on welfare state to a large degree and also STILL cannot keep it together in terms of committing crimes / being an active menace to others, it should be valid to deprive them of a lot of agency. Kinda like 3 year olds.
At any rate in context of the article, I think agency should be proportional to responsibility. NYC should just be tough on crime in this case, and any mental health defense should be conditional on losing agency. If you are mentally healthy enough to refuse to be committed, you are mentally healthy enough to be held responsible and go to jail.
Amen to this. My mother had schizophrenia as I was growing up and she was hospitalized multiple times during my youth. Sometimes time away allowed for healing and a "normal" life for a while. I'm not sure she could have pulled herself out of these situations without supervision.
Fast forward 30 years, and all the state hospitals are closed. Mentally sick people are left to live on the streets. Meanwhile our culture gets sicker and sicker. Thank you for invoking God.
Fast forward individual lives, and see how many elderly are now running into a similar Catch 22 with the increasing rates of dementia. Our cultural fixation with individualism and agency leaves a lot of folks in a gray area where they lose their ability to manage their own lives but are not yet clear cases for the state to protect.
During this limbo, people are at great risk for exploitation as well as avoidable catastrophes due to simply being invisible during their decline. Rather than willful neglect, there is simply nobody there with assigned duty to steer folks on the least unhappy path.
Ironically, people with mental illnesses appear to be much more likely to develop dementia too. So they can experience multiple flavors of this tragedy.
Yeah. On the flip side though, I am firmly against doctors and medical professionals deciding if you should be detained against your will even if you are not sane. I think the balance would be for sane people to opt out of such "treatment" so when the state/institutions attempt to imprison you, you have a way out because while certified as sane you notified them of your will.
Sane or not a person is a person and not a property. Others shouldn't decide your fate without your consent unless your fate affects others. Cruelty disguised as charity is not right. But by default opt-in seems reasonable. If even euthanasia is popular, I hope my comment isn't too extreme or controversial.
This is good. We need more of this, especially in California. The idea that we just let mentally ill people out on the street is not "freedom". It's disgusting and creates danger for them and for others. We need to hospitalize mentally ill people and force them to take medication if they are unwilling.
I want you to say this after you stayed a week in one of these hospitals. You do not care about us, you care about seeing us.
You want us to be forced to take medications? Which ones? The ones that don't work of the one that give us heart diseases, tardive dyskinesia, and also do not work?
It disgusting? You know what is disgusting? The way people make the mentally ill homeless because they want to rent an AirBnB or have two or threee houses or got house rich with 2% mortgages and created the homelessness problem.
Mentally ill people are not homeless because of Airbnb or capitalism. Mentally ill people are homeless because they are MENTALLY ILL. 99% of homeless people are either drug addicts or mentally ill, and they need help, even if we have to force it upon then. It's not freedom to be living on the streets in piles of your own shit. It's inhumane that we as a society just abandon them because we are afraid to force people to get better and it's even worse that formerly honorable institutions such as the ACLU prevent these people from getting the help they need. We need MORE forced help of mentally ill people, not less.
Eh. Y'all are both shouting past each other with zero nuance.
We cannot say housing/Airbnb is not an issue entirely. On most nights, I have three houses within 100ft of me that are empty because they are short rentals near the city center. I wonder if there are a few people who would like to live in those homes if they could?
But yes too, many are mentally ill and some need more than just a bed.
The Airbnb argument does not hold water. Would someone love to live for free in a vacant Airbnb? Yes. Almost everyone would. So let's then give everyone free housing forever, what are we, capitalist pigs?
In aggregate, Airbnb pushes real estate prices upward. If we didn't have them, and the utility of dwellings was limited to its use as primary home, more people could afford housing. As it stands, the people with more money earn more money.
I didn't suggest squatting is a solution. You punched your own straw man.
Involuntary hospitalization saved a family member’s life as they were having a psychosis episode. It’s such a crazy situation because we assume agency.
"Hospitals often cite a shortage of psychiatric beds as the reason for discharging patients, but the mayor said that the city would make sure there were enough beds for people who are removed. He noted that Gov. Kathy Hochul had agreed to add 50 new psychiatric beds. “We are going to find a bed for everyone,” Mr. Adams said."
Huh? I would have expected you would need at least thousands of new psychiatric beds to meet the need in a city as large as New York City.
I think the "too mentally ill to care for themselves" standard is pretty high, it's not just "would benefit from psychiatric care", I doubt it encompasses that many people. Which is probably a good thing, we shouldn't be involuntarily committing that many people either.
This is absolutely fantastic news, and MUCH more humane than letting the incapacitated die in public. We'll look back at this period in horror, and the ACLU bears much of the blame.
Really, as someone diagnosed as “mentally ill”, what I want the most is job opportunity. The only reason to be on the streets is that you can’t afford rent (especially in NYC) with the meager disability payments from the government we are dependent on.
I was floored by the reporting from the sfchronicle about the conditions in one of the hotels San Francisco leased and used to house the "homeless" during the pandemic. I put "homeless" in quotes because it is not fair to use this term to describe the hellscape that was this hotel. There was, at one point, a meth and fentanyl addicted man roaming the hallways slashing people's faces with a knife because he wasn't getting the help he needs [1].
If that last sentence caused you to pause a bit, fair enough, I paused when I read it in the Chronicle as well. Those aren't my words, that's a quote from someone involved in the program. Thing is, I actually do agree with the statement. But it does astound me how determined we are to use only the language of compassion, even when describing a drug addicted man who is roaming the halls of the housing of last resort for homeless people in a pandemic, slashing faces with a knife. Our language around this does hint at the source of our profound paralysis.
As for mental institutions, they have a bad rep for a good reason. But consider the depths we have plumbed in street conditions, tent camps, drug scenes, fentanyl overdoses, meth-induced violence, and somehow using a single term, "homelessness", to encompass this and people who are having trouble affording housing, blurring the distinction. I know it's always risky to take the perspective of the future as if it will prove one right, but... maybe we will look back on our treatment of the mentally ill as simply another installment in the cruelty of our mental institution, just that we sent it from the institutions to the streets for a while, but that those looking back will not see an appreciable difference. That last sentence is optimistic, because it at least leaves open the possibility that we will someday look back on this from a better place.
To me, this conviction to just let mentally ill people roam the streets is enabling, not compassionate. A truly compassionate view cares about well-being, not just agency. Would you rather see your own child rot on the street in a psychotic delirium or get them help, even if it's not voluntary?
The easiest thing to do is to say "it's their own choice".
> There was, at one point, a meth and fentanyl addicted man roaming the hallways slashing people's faces with a knife because he wasn't getting the help he needs [1].
A violent knife slasher belongs in prison. Help he needs? What does that mean?
To try to be as charitable as possible to the journalist who wrote this line, I'd say it means that there was a moment when "we" (society and our institutions) might have been able to intervene in this man's life in order to treat the drug addiction and mental illness, and that we failed to do so, and now we have a face slasher roaming the halls of a res hotel with a knife. There is some merit in this. And when I say I agree (to an extent), I mean it, but "getting the help he needs" clearly means commitment to an institution, and ideally we'd find a way to do this before the face slashing occurs. Kind of like how we don't wait for a drunk driver to kill people before we start enforcing laws on drunk driving, even if the drunk driving is the result of a deep addiction and/or mental illness.
However, I ultimately have the same reaction you do to this sentence. The pure language of compassion shows no compassion for the victims of this crime, or the horrifying and brutal nature of this crime. It really does pinpoint the source of paralysis in a very progressive city like San Francisco. I have trouble believing that we won't reach some kind of turning point, mainly because the failure is just so spectacularly and overwhelmingly undeniable.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] thread>“The common misunderstanding persists that we cannot provide involuntary assistance unless the person is violent,” Mr. Adams said. “This myth must be put to rest. Going forward, we will make every effort to assist those who are suffering from mental illness and whose illness is endangering them by preventing them from meeting their basic human needs.”
How does this work with federal US Supreme Court rulings such Connor Donaldson and Addington Texas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas
Some more cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_...
NYC especially is pretty good at this: they make a law, it works through the system and gets struck down by SCOTUS, then they immediately make a slightly different law which has to work through the system and be struck down.
It’s way quicker to make a law than it is to strike it down. Ultimately, if the people of a region keep electing lawmakers who make unconstitutional laws, that region will have unconstitutional law most of the time.
All boils down to “government is doing something with force of law” and is reviewable by SCOTUS.
Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to view this phenomenon within the context of the balanced powers of government? The Supreme Court has the final say in the constitutionality of a certain law, but that doesn’t make them the most powerful branch of government. They lack the power to try again, and the legislature and the executive have that power.
To me, the system is working as intended when the people elect representatives who repeatedly force the judicial branch to strike down laws the people want. This seems to be a way to redirect this type of question into a political solution, i.e., a way to force people to recognize that what they really want is not a particular law, but a better judiciary or a center Constitution.
After all, the chain of events you’re describing is one that never departs from the mechanisms considered by the Constitution (and the Marbury court, of course, but that ship has sailed).
Ideally you would have lawmakers incentivized to produce laws, that upon review, are constitutional, but it remains the supreme court’s jurisdiction to determine that constitutionality.
Like try spamming the FDA drugs unlikely to pass scrutiny — they’ll just shut you out — so you’re incentivized to try to submit something reasonably likely to pass.
I agree that there is no disincentive to passing laws that the judiciary will nullify (other than the fact they get nullified and have to be replaced). The “malicious actor” of whom you speak appears to me to be the representative of the populace, from whom all power derives, and accordingly I see this as a feature, not a bug. The only incentive they should need to pass useful laws is re-election.
My ideal would be that the courts would interpret and make law, but that political questions like “what comports with the Constitution” would be solved at the ballot box, in the legislature, or with the veto pen, as was intended.
The idea that the judicial branch could be made “impotent” via repeated passing through the duly empowered legislature of bills signed by the duly empowered executive seems like exactly the right amount of power for what was considered by Article III. The courts are, after all, currently the strongest part of our constitutional system.
> ruling that a state cannot constitutionally confine a non-dangerous individual who is capable of surviving safely in freedom by themselves or with the help of willing and responsible family members or friends.
The non-paywalled portion of the article
> Mayor Eric Adams directed the police and emergency medical workers to hospitalize people they deemed too mentally ill to care for themselves, even if they posed no threat to others.
These seem to be the same standard, they are confining people who incapable of caring for themselves, which O'Connor v. Donaldson apparently allowed.
They only get involved when those family members and friends call them directly, or the person is found wandering around.
The "public medical facilities" were terrible, underfunded and everybody shut most of them down.
Of course, nobody actually set up anything to take their place because that would be expensive.
And here we are.
On an aggregate level, I would say two things: 1) I assume most people who are homeless did not choose to be homeless with sound mind and free will. If I am right, then we should do what we can to get them off the streets if they are sane and willing, and take them off the streets involuntarily if they are in decrepit health or are in any way violent.
2) Let's say most of the homeless were living the vagabond life. I asserr there exists a limit on the sustainable homeless population in any community or city. At some point, when do cities say "no you can't shit in the bushes in the park, no you can't have entire parks taken over as makeshift campsites, no we will not tolerate IV drug use which litters our streets"?
More needs done, out of compassion and out of necessity for the housed community.
It's unsurprising. NYC elected a cop as mayor, and his only idea for solving the city's problems is more policing. It hasn't worked in the past, and it won't work now, but the media and real estate classes here keep demanding it anyway.
Why not just give these people free housing with assisted care on location? If we can survive on the street we can surly survive in a residential setting.
What will happen is they they will pump us full of drugs to sedate us and just keep sucking money out of the state and federal government so that these hospital owners can buy another house in Bermuda.
surely giving anti-psychotic drugs isn't tantamount to abuse in severe cases.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/tent-fires-are-o...
For these people who have severe mental illness, free housing with assisted care on location looks a lot like a mental institution. Without oversight they are liable to walk out of care and be back on the street. For some homeless, that's how they are on the street today. They might have gotten a delusion that leads them from disappearing from their families, and sometimes they find them years later living on the streets in a state of complete dissociation with reality, other times they never find them.
The agony induced by haloperidol was used by the Soviets to help their dissidents realize the gulags were much better places than the psycho prisons.
Same with healthcare or housing or any other population wide benefit policy where benefit recipients can migrate in and net payers into the system can migrate out.
Houses.
> many homeless (not all) that menace pedestrians and businesses on a daily basis?
Houses.
You see, the answer is simple but there is just no will to do it because people do not care about the mentally ill. We scare people for no reason but their own ignorance. I would say 90% of the mentally ill would have a great remission of their symptoms if they had stable housing.
I am homeless, all I need is a simple fcking studio but even making a lot of money from disability I cannot afford one anymore and I get shut down by people who do not want to rent to me because I am on diability.
Poor people who are not mentally ill often do exactly that. Even some drug addicts can sometimes get together to rent a place to crash. But we're talking about the severely mentally ill here. They are unable to band together. I imagine that this is sort of by definition... those who's mental illness illness is mild enough that they can help themselves by working together... just do it. The remaining are on the streets.
Can we agree that different people have different urgent needs? I agree with you that you need a house. A mentally unstable person who can’t take care of themselves needs mental help. A person with hard drug addiction destroying them needs physical and mental help. Not all problems can be solved with free housing, just like not all problems can be solved with involuntary hospitalization.
That is unfair, as it implying that throwing houses at the problem will magically fix it. Houses would help, for some (many) cases, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Nor is it simple to supply those houses, and lack of doing so isn't just "not caring". It's hard. It's really hard.
I don't notice much difference with him compared to de Blasio, except de Blasio was universally not liked. Adams is better but surprisingly by not much.
> It hasn't worked in the past
Considering the 70s were a complete mess & a generation afterwards it didn't feel like that, whatever happened in-between seems to have improved things. And that improvement definitely did come from police to some degree.
Crime was at a historic low until recently with the advent of "defund."
By the way, "defund" was also about using some paramilitary police funding to fund social services and mental health calls like the ones that may be dealing with the people in this discussion.
Finally, recall that "defund" kicked off at the same time as a global pandemic and major economic shock, an affordable housing shortage, a wage shortage and a drug epidemic.
so are you pro-worker or not (I suspect you are pro-worker), cause it sounds like you're hashing out anti-worker rhetoric against your enemies
I hear this all the time from ppl, it's this automatic talking point that cops don't do their job, so we should just push dangerous slogans like defund - when cops are desperately needed in actually dangerous neighborhoods. It's a very privileged sentiment.
If the rail workers threatening a strike had a history of disabling crossing guards on railroad crossings to hit cars without warning, and their union didn't want conductors to get fired for that, I'd be against the railroad union, too.
Again, "defund", this scary slogan, attempted to wrap a lot of ideas up, most of which did not directly mean "eliminate the role of law enforcement". And, like I said and you failed to refute, substantial police budget cuts are quite sparse. So what's dangerous besides something that hasn't happened? What's dangerous other than cops quiet quitting to protest things that haven't happened?
Public sector employees are represented by the public in voting. The idea that they should bargain with the public is ridiculous when they are the public elected by the public. Any additional "protection" will dangerously insulate them from reform & accountability to the will of the public.
Public sector unions are fundamentally anti-democratic.
With a union, they're able to hold other citizens hostage. It's disgraceful and exactly why they're able to get humongous budgets for doing nothing, as you seem to admit.
Mind you this happens with teachers and other public sector employees. Pretty much inevitably.
Of course, the people who get up-in-arms about police never extend their logic to their own sacred cows.
We should probably nationalize our railroads, too, but that's a different discussion.
We've gone off the rails (!) but we might agree more than disagree. My stances:
Homelessness: housing needs to be more affordable, income inequality should be reduced through progressively higher taxes, and funding for mental healthcare and public safety should be increased.
Cops: major reforms required but they are a necessity in society.
Unions: reasonable for private sector, debatable for public sector, dangerous in the case of law enforcement.
Oh, and the root of our failures in government is the two party system which lowers morale for the public, promotes political extremism and encourages fear-based politicking instead of solution -based politicking.
This is begging the question. You have to explain why you think that's bad, not merely describe what's happening.
Obviously you're assuming a shared sense that it's illegitimate to intern someone without a trial, but the whole point here is that some people think an exception should be made in this particular case. You're just reiterating the controversy.
We could force the state to put these people in front of a judge or jury if you prefer. California does--and my experience is that these people seem to get reasonable aggressive representation from the state.
It unfortunately won't change much.
There aren't enough beds--that's the simple truth. So, this isn't going to put even a dent into the situation.
The trope about "the Mayor is a former cop" makes for good political talking points but it's meaningless otherwise. In what way has NYC become any different since Adams took the helm?
There's also a WP page on the history of deinstitutionalization world-wide [1]. It starts from the 19th century, talking about sanitariums and what happened with them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalization_in_the_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation
Yes. Thats how it worked for over 100 years in the US, until the 1980s. I remember being shocked to learn this too, being too young to remember such a time. The “funny farm” was a real place.
But the alternative is what we have now. Where every major city in the country has thousands of deranged psychotic people roaming the streets, completely unmedicated or cared for, until they inevitably cause harm to themselves or someone else.
50 more psych beds won’t cut it.
The solution is easy bu they truth is no one cares. No one cares about the mentally ill homeless. No one. I know this because I ma mentally ill and homeless now for four years. People would rather make bank off an AirBnB than rent it to me for half the price and still make it so I am paying of f half their mortgage. It is just greed, simple greed, with everyone.
I am not even asking for much, a simple studio, but no one cares, so I get worse and worse and then you will all pay SO MUCH MORE when I am in the hospital and medicare has to pay for my $10,000 a week hospitalization.
It is all so idiotic.
Huh. Every now and again, I'll think that I basically understand the broad strokes of the US political system reasonably well for someone who doesn't live there.
Then I learn that mayors can section people, which surely takes time away from core mayoral duties like opening supermarkets.
IMO, what you're saying is analogous to "if someone suffering from clinical depression wants to kill themselves, let them." I vote no. Please think about it a bit.
Personally I find your stance far more judgmental than mine; no one needs to 'justify' to someone else why they will or will not commit suicide. It's not even for me to justify or not when someone else does that and I reject your allegation I've done so.
I can't honestly say I know that living in a psychosis (medicated or not) is always better than dying. I defer that judgement to the owner of the body contemplating suicide. Personally no I would not stop the bleeding if asked not to, whether their choice was rational or not. I believe consent and personal choices trump my feelings or trauma from past experiences, even if it turns out the choice of others may be misplaced.
It would be odd indeed if it was OK to stop the dying only if they intentionally performed the action that led to their (imminent) death, but not OK to stop the dying if it was caused by something like a disease.
What is this theoretical individual losing if we help them? What is the society losing if we act to help?
Sadly that is not the reality we live in. The dictator, in this case is New York and various government entities. A government notorious for putting mentally ill in wards where people are "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo." [0] Without magic wands, the doctors are not always returning them to neurotypical condition, but rather often some other, perhaps clinically more palatable often drug-induced different mental state. There is often no neurotypical state the wand can be waved to, and often the decision for suicide overlaps between "ill" ad not ill persons particularly when they're subjected to indefinite stays in facilities under conditions of sexual abuse such as historically found in New York mental wards. Hell I might argue it may be cruel to stop someone from committing suicide to avoid being "helped" by New York.
That is, we are dealing with gritty, dirty reality where the mentally ill entity that is the state of New York, itself unqualified in its mental facilities, has a history of sexually and physically abusing people [0, but that's not all] to "protect" them from their own mental illness/suicide etc. Even if the consent argument fails on merits (I disagree), I argue the decision cannot and should not rest on the state in non-criminal concerns of imposing force on the ill (and notwithstanding the dystopic notion of government entities choosing who meets often poorly defined mental diseases).
With the state totally unqualified, and the individual on his own on the street often with family far removed, I defer to his perhaps ill consent. Notwithstanding, of course all help that can be offered should be.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School
I do not think the alternative society that say maximizes certain utilities at the cost of consent is wrong per se as long as it's possible to freely enter/exit such a society, I just find it incompatible with my values. While I disagree with the notion of stopping someone who has asked his/her respects to be honored in regard to suicide, I don't think it's some moral failing if a private individual makes an in-the-moment reaction to stop them. It's pretty much human instinct to try to preserve innocent life of those around us, so hopefully it hasn't been read that I think you're a bad person or something if you see someone cutting themselves and you stop them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School
You have already heard all the unsolicited opinions and suggestions from people who have no fucking clue what you're going through or what 6oige been through. You have been told "just do X, Y, Z" and have been given countless resources both local and national that others think would help you. You tried contacting a few and they were too demanding, demeaning, or discriminating.
You spent a lot of time learning helplessness even as you became self sufficient to the best of your ability. It wasn't enough either way. Nobody wanted to help you, they just wanted to tell you that they want to, and you discovered that you don't even want their help anyway because it comes with caveats and requirements that you simply cannot tolerate or meet.
You found a way to stay connected and survive despite all this. You know you can take care of yourself. You know you are worth someone's effort and time, but you can't find that someone. Every time you think you do, they fuck you over in some way.
The tiny things added up. A broken this, a missed that, a forgotten something by someone. Dominoes fell. There are plenty of individuals at fault but it's mostly the systems, or The System. The World Should Be Better, but it's not. People are assholes, churches and charities are grifters, there's no hope for those who proffer hope. You're right.
You're right. You're on your own. You're better than all of them.
Prove it.
Workin' on it to the best of my ability. 'Tis taking far longer than I'd hoped, and all the while the pain and lack of sleep drives me slowly insane… It's a race against time, and so far time is winning. Ah well… Live alone, die alone, even surrounded by 8 billion others… C'est la vie…
He was allowed to go on like this for years because his brother was very wealthy and was generous with the school administrators.
My last year there, the dorm was slated to be torn down and replaced with a much larger one. His brother had to come and take him away.
A few months later I saw him sitting on a bench and he looked like a completely different person. Clean shaven, put together. He told me the time he spent living in the storage closet was horrible and he wished his brother had forced him into treatment years earlier.
I find myself utterly incompatible in living in such a society and I've spent much of my life seeking other people and locations that eschew such violence
Also If we're going by someone with compromised mental faculties, I would say an organization (state of New York) who physically and/or sexually abuses the disabled* is not fit to make these decisions. The New York State government has proven themselves to have compromised mental faculties and thus unable to make these decisions to violently/forcibly institutionalize the portion of 'mentally ill' adults who don't aggress upon others. In part New York paired down their institutions because they were such terrible places for these people to be, often worse than in the gutter with teeth rotting.
IMO even the disabled, especially if they are not acting in a criminal capacity, should be asked for their consent before violently being forced into institutions of physical and sexual abuse for which New York is known.
*grep for my below comment about Willowbrook State School where we discover the (mentally disabled) children you worry so much about are actually abused by New York when institutionalized.
You don't draw child's line at merely being to express their desires, why would you do so for an adult?
If I were a child of sufficient age to express desires I would rather beg in the streets in a state of psychosis than be in the institutions such as New York's Willowbrook State School.
In any case, it's shifting the goalposts. Now we are talking about particular states depriving people from agency, in the previous comment you were talking about a mentally unwell person being categorically entitled to their agency...
I personally think it's a two way street, with 2 inflection points. If someone depends on welfare state in any significant degree, it should be valid to deprive them of a little bit of agency, since it's sorta indicative of them not being capable of good decisions. Kinda like teenagers in the child analogy. If someone depends on welfare state to a large degree and also STILL cannot keep it together in terms of committing crimes / being an active menace to others, it should be valid to deprive them of a lot of agency. Kinda like 3 year olds.
At any rate in context of the article, I think agency should be proportional to responsibility. NYC should just be tough on crime in this case, and any mental health defense should be conditional on losing agency. If you are mentally healthy enough to refuse to be committed, you are mentally healthy enough to be held responsible and go to jail.
Fast forward 30 years, and all the state hospitals are closed. Mentally sick people are left to live on the streets. Meanwhile our culture gets sicker and sicker. Thank you for invoking God.
During this limbo, people are at great risk for exploitation as well as avoidable catastrophes due to simply being invisible during their decline. Rather than willful neglect, there is simply nobody there with assigned duty to steer folks on the least unhappy path.
Ironically, people with mental illnesses appear to be much more likely to develop dementia too. So they can experience multiple flavors of this tragedy.
Sane or not a person is a person and not a property. Others shouldn't decide your fate without your consent unless your fate affects others. Cruelty disguised as charity is not right. But by default opt-in seems reasonable. If even euthanasia is popular, I hope my comment isn't too extreme or controversial.
I want you to say this after you stayed a week in one of these hospitals. You do not care about us, you care about seeing us.
You want us to be forced to take medications? Which ones? The ones that don't work of the one that give us heart diseases, tardive dyskinesia, and also do not work?
It disgusting? You know what is disgusting? The way people make the mentally ill homeless because they want to rent an AirBnB or have two or threee houses or got house rich with 2% mortgages and created the homelessness problem.
We cannot say housing/Airbnb is not an issue entirely. On most nights, I have three houses within 100ft of me that are empty because they are short rentals near the city center. I wonder if there are a few people who would like to live in those homes if they could?
But yes too, many are mentally ill and some need more than just a bed.
I didn't suggest squatting is a solution. You punched your own straw man.
If only we had a test for strength of free will…
Huh? I would have expected you would need at least thousands of new psychiatric beds to meet the need in a city as large as New York City.
If that last sentence caused you to pause a bit, fair enough, I paused when I read it in the Chronicle as well. Those aren't my words, that's a quote from someone involved in the program. Thing is, I actually do agree with the statement. But it does astound me how determined we are to use only the language of compassion, even when describing a drug addicted man who is roaming the halls of the housing of last resort for homeless people in a pandemic, slashing faces with a knife. Our language around this does hint at the source of our profound paralysis.
As for mental institutions, they have a bad rep for a good reason. But consider the depths we have plumbed in street conditions, tent camps, drug scenes, fentanyl overdoses, meth-induced violence, and somehow using a single term, "homelessness", to encompass this and people who are having trouble affording housing, blurring the distinction. I know it's always risky to take the perspective of the future as if it will prove one right, but... maybe we will look back on our treatment of the mentally ill as simply another installment in the cruelty of our mental institution, just that we sent it from the institutions to the streets for a while, but that those looking back will not see an appreciable difference. That last sentence is optimistic, because it at least leaves open the possibility that we will someday look back on this from a better place.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros
The easiest thing to do is to say "it's their own choice".
A violent knife slasher belongs in prison. Help he needs? What does that mean?
However, I ultimately have the same reaction you do to this sentence. The pure language of compassion shows no compassion for the victims of this crime, or the horrifying and brutal nature of this crime. It really does pinpoint the source of paralysis in a very progressive city like San Francisco. I have trouble believing that we won't reach some kind of turning point, mainly because the failure is just so spectacularly and overwhelmingly undeniable.
Phase II was to let them out of asylums, and then sending them to prison after they committed crimes (the 90's, 2000's)
Phase III was to let them out of prison, because we are over-incarcerating, studies show that recidivism is worse when people are imprisoned [1]
Phase IV - send them back to the asylum
We're currently flirting with phase IV.
1- Blah blah blah John Jay School of Criminal Justice Blah blah blah Social Science Blah Blah Blah The Carceral System [tm]