Forced Mental Health Treatment

Granite Dad sent an article by Freddie deBoer* in the New York Intelligencer, The Case for Forcing The Mentally Ill Into Treatment. I am gratified that Granite Dad has been paying attention all these years, noting right off the bat that deBoer does not likely have much awareness how expensive this would be. But still, there are good points throughout the opinion piece. 

But fear of violence on the subway is in fact rational, even as we must rise above that fear to embrace compassion. The gloating insistence from progressives that they are never bothered by the behavior of disturbed people on the subway does not fit the facts about mental illness and violence...

Let’s start with problems we don’t have. New York City is not in the middle of a crime wave. There has not been a terrible spike in violent crime in the past year, not in the subways or parks or anywhere else. There was, as in the country writ large, a spike in murders and gun crimes in 2021; the reasons for this are hotly debated, as you’d predict. (I’m going with cops refusing to do their jobs, personally.) Happily for all of us, the pandemic-era crime surge both rose and fell swiftly, and we’re living through a record decline in murders. Subway crime specifically has fallen...

And tellingly,  

A New York Times piece from November 2023 used the same language, saying “mentally ill people are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than to commit one.”

That statement is, in fact, true — true and meaningless. It says literally nothing about the question of whether the mentally ill are more likely to commit acts of violence against strangers or not.

The reality is that because a small percentage of people commit the large majority of violent crimes, members of almost any identifiable group are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than to be the perpetrators.

There are other missing pieces, as I know from working in this field for over forty years. It gets easy for harried social workers, cops, nurses, to shade off focusing on what is clearly dangerous to what "would be good for Jason" (and it would be good for Jason - like a roommate who isn't a violent druggy after his check), or what "would give this poor family a break," and be tempted to move farther and farther from what the letter of the law is, and the spirit of the law is. Rights get shaved, partly from compassion and partly from weariness.

Secondly, treatment is seldom fully effective with few side effects. There is a lot of gray area of meds that help a lot but feel awful to take, given to people who don't remember how miserable they were when they were ill and are therefore outraged at those side effects.  Worse, there are some patients who get only a little benefit.  For society, that might be a worthy difference, keeping them off the edge of complete meltdown and violence or helplessness, but it is not good for the patient.

Well, we have covered this before, many times in the old days at the beginning of this site when i saw myself as a psychblogger.

 

*deBoer is every conservative's favorite socialist (even communist), as he is unsparing in his honesty about the reality of social programs not doing what they claim, beginning with educational programs, continuing through affirmative action, and ending...well, I don't know where else it goes, come to think of it.  I should look it up, shouldn't I? 

His view on social inequality is similar to Chesterton's comments about the undeserving poor.  “ It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.”Heretics