You’ve smeared your brother’s life and principles as “sick” - a dodgy claim to make about anyone. There may be no “Christian value” more important than respect for each person. And, you don’t abide by it. You didn’t specify and condemn any of your brother’s actions. Instead, you’ve condemned his existence. That’s what you want the state to punish. If there’s a hell, you are headed there, you depraved piece of shit.
Is the rise in violent crime really the result of ending stop and frisk policies? It seems to spike very suddenly, coinciding with COVID/George Floyd protest. Stop and frisk ended in NYC in 2014, without a corresponding spike in violent crime/murder, and murders/robberies are still below 2010 levels even after the 2020 spike. I'm not sure that's a reasonable inference.
But how do you respond to the fact that murders/violent crime continued to decline in NYC after the end of stop and frisk? Doesn't that show it is not a major contributor to low crime rates? If it was the thing holding it all together you would expect murder/violent crime per capita to rise after 2014, but the record low for murders in NYC were from 2017-2019, the last years before the COVID/George Floyd protest spike.
The idea that stop and frisk in particular is responsible for any rise in crime is pretty absurd. Reminds me of the people who whine about how those "liberal cities" defunded the police, a thing that Republicans have been running on as a scare tactic for years now despite it never happening
Lol you send me an article from 3 years ago that talks about how most major cities actually increased their police budgets, those that didn't were largely just cutting their entire budgets post-pandemic, and a rudimentary googling shows that most of the cities cited in that article reversed their course like one year later?
`It won’t happen of course because no one values black lives over progressive dogma.'
There has been no nation-wide flood of black on anyone violence.
The movement to end stop-and-frisk was supported and driven by, and involved, black people. A lot of them.
Black people in poor and marginal neighborhoods are right to demand more police presence/responsiveness but that does not equate to wanting the harassment of every 15--34(!) black male.
The state has such a long, and continuing, history of abusing it's coercive powers that a lot of well meaning people mean to take them all away, convinced it cannot wield them responsibly. And in many ways they are right. The state will never wield them with the proper amount of responsibility, because ultimately the state is constructed of people, individuals making their individual judgements in complex situations, a process that will always, on occasion, make the wrong call. But they refuse to do the hard work of tallying up the costs of their proposal, and place an inordinate amount of value on the fact that in their world, no one will be forced to do anything against their will, disregarding entirely the possibility that it might matter that the will itself can be poisoned by illness, by drugs, and by trauma. Individual will is supreme, no matter how corrupted it may be. Nothing else matters.
"The state has such a long, and continuing, history of abusing it's coercive powers that a lot of well meaning people mean to take them all away, convinced it cannot wield them responsibly." But, ironically, these same anti-involuntary commitment people are often self-styled socialists who seem to want the state to take on massive responsibilities in every other area often with a coercive touch. The state is alleged to be perfectly competent to do a million things, but not run mental health facilities.
We are perfectly willing to prosecute and incarcerate people for the types of threatening and even nuisance conduct that mentally ill homeless people get up to. Just not them.
Is that true? I have a feeling a lot of people in prison are just mentally ill homeless people being temporarily detained, who once released back into society will find themselves in prison shortly afterward. But I'd be interested to read anything confirming that we treat homeless people with a lighter hand in the justice system. That just seems very counterintuitive to me.
How do you envision homelessness? If it's a political issue you are probably more likely to view the problem in economic terms: greedy capitalists raise rents so high families cannot afford to pay and are forced out onto the street.
In that little morality play there is no room for those who refuse to take shelter when they are in imminent danger of freezing to death, who would need to be involuntarily committed to protect (sometimes) other people but (mostly) themselves. And of course the end result is that the people least equipped to look out for themselves do the bulk of the suffering. Disgusting and shameful.
I agree with this all the way and just wanted to add two things:
1) Mental illnesses of all kinds (including those which affect the elderly like Alzheimer's) have this nasty effect when they get developed enough and you get so sick you no longer have the ability to even understand how sick you actually are. "Voluntary" or "Consent" lose all meaning in this environment and trying to treat people in such a state with voluntary commitment makes about as much sense as a cornerless square. You could get into a larger discussion about how consent is the absolute core philosophical underpinnings of so much left-liberal political philosophy, to the point where it verges into sacred cow territory, going into territories where it isn't even minimally coherent.
2) There are high legal barriers to involuntary commitment and there should be. Taking someone's freedom away is not a small decision and is nearly on par with criminal imprisonment. That doesn't mean it should go away. In a roster of bad options involuntary commitment or other carceral solutions are often the least bad solution. However, since they are still bad there is always the motivation to invent scenarios where make believe solutions make tough decisions among bad options unnecessary. There are not.
Eloquent and persuasive. I was in Montreal a few days ago, and being hassled by a homeless person. I ignored him and poked me, fairly hard. I turned around and said, go away really loud, but it didn’t help. Fortunately, I was at the building I was heading to and I turned in instead. I don’t think he would’ve harmed me, but it was certainly unpleasant.
I have three little dots to the right-hand side of the post, and one of the options that show up when I click on them is 'edit.' Sometimes it is only there when I am posting from the computer and not on the phone.
Doesn't work on mobile. The Substack mobile app bites a big one. Medium's mobile, OTOH, app is the cat's balls. You can do almost everything on it. Start and edit articles, edit comments, etc etc.
Use your phone’s browser for substack commenting, through the comments at the bottom of the article so your phone doesn’t open the app. Agreed the substack app blows!
Another maneuver I hear/read all the time from the type of 'leftist' you describe here - whenever someone brings up an uncomfortable tradeoff or constraint, they're accused by this person of lacking "political imaginaiton" or something silimar. It's a neat little trick. You simultaneously frame yourself as a visionary and absolve yourself from dealing with the world as we really find it.
I feel like I used to fit into this space when I was younger. Utopian situations seemed somehow very plausible to me, if I could only explain to my elders how they'd lost the ability to look at things anew, and that if they just listened to me, I could reignite some spark in them and make them see it was not just possible, but easy, to remake the world in some obviously better way.
But the reality, obviously, was that I just didn't understand the complexities of the issues I was talking about, or the reality that even if my solutions might be achievable if we all committed ourselves to it, that this would never happen. That we wouldn't ever commit ourselves to it the way we would need to in order to succeed. And so really, even things that are possible in theory and in practice, are in that other way impossible.
“Instead of being involuntarily treated, people with severe mental illness should live independent and autonomous lives of freedom and self-direction in Candyland". I find smug assertations about the severely cognitively impaired equally frustrating - the belief that living in the community should mean the freedom to have //zero restrictions on independent living// even when some restrictions (locks on bathroom cabinets, for instance!) are necessary to protect the lives of customers/ residents.
For some of the people I have known who care about this issue, it seems they see in a strict dichotomy: Either you are locking up everyone, or you must allow them to be free to stay, even if that means dying, on the street. The idea that yes, there must be sufficient money and facilities for those who need and choose them, but there needs to be alternatives for those who are severely impaired and cannot make rational choices. Are there gradations of illness? Of course, but lumping everyone in together, and forcing those who are unable to, to make choices of such importance, is cruel, and in its own way overly controlling.
They haven't yet passed this, free to choose what's best for yourself, idea down to childhood, but that might not be too far off.
I would quibble with this, however, "There is no issue on which there is more resistance to alternative opinion" Speaking up for Palestinian rights are probably right up there, in not being allowed to be expressed, which is another aspect of 'resistance to alternative opinion.'
There are certainly anarchist minded people, some of whom I've met, who view even the parent/child dichotomy as a pernicious form of control and wish to do away with it. I have feeling that 95% of them are not parents.
Not only are they not parents, one hopes, but they don't understand biology or cognitive development. Let's make sure they are the ones making policy decisions!
I dunno, when the parents are religious it is a pernicious form of control. But the answer to this is to sterilize religious people, especially Southern Baptists - not get rid of parental rights.
It should be kept in mind that some of these vocal online anarchist types who think the parent/child relationship is inherently abusive are literal children, Anarchists against bedtime and all that.
I'm not a lefty/liberal, I'm a libertarian that used to consider himself right of center, but now since the damn right has gone kaflooey, I don't know what the hell to call myself.
The first time I read something you wrote about involuntary treatment, the libertarian in me was a little put off. But, you had some persuasive arguments, so I didn't dismiss it out of hand.
Over the years, as I've read more of your stuff on mental illness, I've become convinced that you are on the right side of this. So, although I'm not your target audience for this argument, you won me over anyway.
Thanks for continuing to write and advocate for the seriously psychotic. This isn't about the cute Invisible Rabbit sort of thing, it's the schizophrenic who thinks the zombies are after him and he's got to protect himself.
The people Freddie who are against involuntary institutionalization don't have seriously mentally ill family who are a danger to themselves and others. We get it.
Access to housing will improve the marginal cases, but it didn't keep my nephew from lighting a can of gas in his bedroom because he thought he was a machine. It didn't keep him from starving himself or leaving the hospital to put dirt on his 3rd degree burns so they would heal.
There is also a need for step down assisted living facilities for the chronic acute psychotics who need help staying on their meds and living a functional life. Absolutely, people should live in a least restrictive environment, but there are times for involuntary commitment.
"Yes, a lot of conservatives would close every shelter and send every homeless person to a penal colony, turn them into Soylent Green, if they could. Conservatives are inhumane and wrong. That’s a given."
It is? Really? How did you form this opinion stated as fact? I'm genuinely interested to know.
I'm a conservative living in a conservative town and I've only ever seen and heard conservatives A. donate to and volunteer at the homeless shelters their churches support and B. express that we should reopen inpatient care centers--what used to be called asylums in the Bad Old Days--with modern reforms and methods (no one is talking about chaining people to beds in Kirkbrides) so that the mentally ill who comprise a large majority of the homeless can live in safe and sanitary conditions at least, receive treatment at best, and hopefully help keep our communities safer in the process. That is what conservatives actually say, to my awareness. Maybe there are some very-online so-called conservatives saying "turn the homeless into Nutraloaf" around somewhere that I haven't seen.
I'm sure you don't care to hear this but you are in way more agreement with me and my fellow righty travelers than with your socialist cohort.
And yet, I hear an awful lot of progressives make excuses for libertine culture including unfettered drug use and pretending that this has nothing to do with mental illness or homelessness, but I would still never say something as intellectually lazy and pointlessly antagonistic as "Liberals are inhumane and wrong. They would get every person experiencing psychic pain of some kind hooked on freely available fentanyl and sleeping in their own shit on the street if they could."
Lot of other good stuff in this piece though. Especially your frustration with the negative influence of the leftist mindset and attitude on mental health care. I have a child with a diagnosis and was lucky to find a no-nonsense therapist but it took several false starts with duds to get to someone who could help us.
I think the typical response, though I don't know that it's actually true, and may just be more of an assumption, is that republican lawmakers are thought to consistently balk at the idea of increasing public funding for mental health initiatives. That this is a thing that happens only by the will of democrats.
I'm not sure that's true. This isn't something I pay attention to. But I wouldn't be surprised by it either.
Well, you're not the target audience here. The target audience is left-leaning people who, believing that people who think like themselves are smarter, will give FdB's views more credence if they see he also believes that conservatives are Bad (TM).
That’s what I figured as well. But it still feels gratuitous against his crossover readers. As long as the arguments are good enough, I’ll deal with it.
Precisely! The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress requires that Freddie establish his position in this manner. I like to believe that in his heart of hearts he knows that is BS, but given his stated objective to try to influence those on the Left, he has no choice.
There's definitely common ground to be found between progressives and conservatives on this issue. That's especially true for the small but mighty group that aligns itself with the American Solidarity Party
I mean, this is very obviously poetic license. He means "republicans won't raise taxes a single cent to put more money into caring for the homeless or mentally ill".
If you're on the left, then you'll argue that this is tantamount to letting them die. If you're on the right, then I suppose private charity or churches or something will take care of it?
That one paragraph wasn’t what this essay was about at all, nor was it about you or how you live your life as a Conservative. It’s called flourish or hyperbole to make for an interesting read. Obviously, Conservatives/the right runs the gamut of policy and personal positions, just like the left should.
That the first comment I had to read on this excellent piece was a “but not all of us!” whinge fest is so tiresome, but not surprising.
It was crappy "flourish" or "hyperbole" and was unnecessary and distracting to his larger points; I pay my money and I get to give feedback; you'll be ok
The Candyland-with-Housing-First scenario is playing out in real-time in San Francisco and it's an exercise in can-kicking. Even if you can get people off the streets into SROs, what happens is that the violently mentally ill ones just make life hell for the ones whom that kind of housing can help. Setting little fires, ensuring the place is filled with rodents, chasing other residents down the halls with knives... and if your response is "well arson and knife threats are crimes!" then you're just wanting them locked up but in jail rather than treatment, which is appropriate but at odds with the no-involuntary-treatment aspect.
It is ultimately more humane for some individuals and (in my view, more importantly) better for the rest of us if some people are just committed to institutions against their will. It must be done humanely, carefully, and with few expenses spared. I feel the same way about prison: there should be more of it and it should be vastly safer, more humane, and better-equipped than it is now. The alternative is a kind of benign cruelty to the people under society's care and a chaotic environment for the rest of us.
Since involuntary treatment centers will host a disproportionate number of people of color, liberals will never get behind them, least they be labeled bigots that want to lock up brown people. It doesn't matter that the social and environmental factors that contributed to this endpoint are really what should be of concern and the work of liberals to reverse; liberals would rather eliminate the structures that display the inequity of the system's endpoints than critically understand and work on the upstream factors.
I'm curious - what's your basis for asserting that "...involuntary treatment centers will host a disproportionate number of people of color..."? It's not obvious to me that POC's tend to suffer from severe mental illnesses that would require involuntary commitment at a higher rate than the general population.
I feel pretty broadly supportive of these ideas, though I do think a lot of the actual historical record of sanitariums is easy to find and not great. I’d like to have a how can we do this in a way which isn’t eternal purgatory and making sure mildly neurotic or just plain annoying people. Like perhaps these are all overblown fears but they do creep up for me.
Like I’d want to know more about what this looks like as a day to day part of government and less about should we have institutions like this.
What's the clinical evidence for the success of involuntary commitment? I've read all of Freddie's pieces on this (I think), but I can't recall him citing clinical evidence on its success. This persuasive logical and moral case ultimately rests on the assumption it works and would work for the patients.
I mean, yes, you want it to work for the patients, but then also need to define 'works' in that case. Works better as for their safety? Works better for their overall mental health? The other component, of course, is whether it works better for the rest of society, and based on how things are going now, that doesn't seem a super high bar to clear.
Even if involuntary commitment does not solve the root problem of the insanity, it will at least prevent them from wandering about pushing old ladies in front of trains, leaving dirty needles in public parks, and getting stabbed to death by young men driven to a fury that this crazy fucker flashed their little sisters.
You’ve smeared your brother’s life and principles as “sick” - a dodgy claim to make about anyone. There may be no “Christian value” more important than respect for each person. And, you don’t abide by it. You didn’t specify and condemn any of your brother’s actions. Instead, you’ve condemned his existence. That’s what you want the state to punish. If there’s a hell, you are headed there, you depraved piece of shit.
Is the rise in violent crime really the result of ending stop and frisk policies? It seems to spike very suddenly, coinciding with COVID/George Floyd protest. Stop and frisk ended in NYC in 2014, without a corresponding spike in violent crime/murder, and murders/robberies are still below 2010 levels even after the 2020 spike. I'm not sure that's a reasonable inference.
But how do you respond to the fact that murders/violent crime continued to decline in NYC after the end of stop and frisk? Doesn't that show it is not a major contributor to low crime rates? If it was the thing holding it all together you would expect murder/violent crime per capita to rise after 2014, but the record low for murders in NYC were from 2017-2019, the last years before the COVID/George Floyd protest spike.
The idea that stop and frisk in particular is responsible for any rise in crime is pretty absurd. Reminds me of the people who whine about how those "liberal cities" defunded the police, a thing that Republicans have been running on as a scare tactic for years now despite it never happening
"never happening"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-defund-police-transferring-money-community
Lol you send me an article from 3 years ago that talks about how most major cities actually increased their police budgets, those that didn't were largely just cutting their entire budgets post-pandemic, and a rudimentary googling shows that most of the cities cited in that article reversed their course like one year later?
`It won’t happen of course because no one values black lives over progressive dogma.'
There has been no nation-wide flood of black on anyone violence.
The movement to end stop-and-frisk was supported and driven by, and involved, black people. A lot of them.
Black people in poor and marginal neighborhoods are right to demand more police presence/responsiveness but that does not equate to wanting the harassment of every 15--34(!) black male.
The state has such a long, and continuing, history of abusing it's coercive powers that a lot of well meaning people mean to take them all away, convinced it cannot wield them responsibly. And in many ways they are right. The state will never wield them with the proper amount of responsibility, because ultimately the state is constructed of people, individuals making their individual judgements in complex situations, a process that will always, on occasion, make the wrong call. But they refuse to do the hard work of tallying up the costs of their proposal, and place an inordinate amount of value on the fact that in their world, no one will be forced to do anything against their will, disregarding entirely the possibility that it might matter that the will itself can be poisoned by illness, by drugs, and by trauma. Individual will is supreme, no matter how corrupted it may be. Nothing else matters.
"The state has such a long, and continuing, history of abusing it's coercive powers that a lot of well meaning people mean to take them all away, convinced it cannot wield them responsibly." But, ironically, these same anti-involuntary commitment people are often self-styled socialists who seem to want the state to take on massive responsibilities in every other area often with a coercive touch. The state is alleged to be perfectly competent to do a million things, but not run mental health facilities.
We are perfectly willing to prosecute and incarcerate people for the types of threatening and even nuisance conduct that mentally ill homeless people get up to. Just not them.
Is that true? I have a feeling a lot of people in prison are just mentally ill homeless people being temporarily detained, who once released back into society will find themselves in prison shortly afterward. But I'd be interested to read anything confirming that we treat homeless people with a lighter hand in the justice system. That just seems very counterintuitive to me.
How do you envision homelessness? If it's a political issue you are probably more likely to view the problem in economic terms: greedy capitalists raise rents so high families cannot afford to pay and are forced out onto the street.
In that little morality play there is no room for those who refuse to take shelter when they are in imminent danger of freezing to death, who would need to be involuntarily committed to protect (sometimes) other people but (mostly) themselves. And of course the end result is that the people least equipped to look out for themselves do the bulk of the suffering. Disgusting and shameful.
I agree with this all the way and just wanted to add two things:
1) Mental illnesses of all kinds (including those which affect the elderly like Alzheimer's) have this nasty effect when they get developed enough and you get so sick you no longer have the ability to even understand how sick you actually are. "Voluntary" or "Consent" lose all meaning in this environment and trying to treat people in such a state with voluntary commitment makes about as much sense as a cornerless square. You could get into a larger discussion about how consent is the absolute core philosophical underpinnings of so much left-liberal political philosophy, to the point where it verges into sacred cow territory, going into territories where it isn't even minimally coherent.
2) There are high legal barriers to involuntary commitment and there should be. Taking someone's freedom away is not a small decision and is nearly on par with criminal imprisonment. That doesn't mean it should go away. In a roster of bad options involuntary commitment or other carceral solutions are often the least bad solution. However, since they are still bad there is always the motivation to invent scenarios where make believe solutions make tough decisions among bad options unnecessary. There are not.
Eloquent and persuasive. I was in Montreal a few days ago, and being hassled by a homeless person. I ignored him and poked me, fairly hard. I turned around and said, go away really loud, but it didn’t help. Fortunately, I was at the building I was heading to and I turned in instead. I don’t think he would’ve harmed me, but it was certainly unpleasant.
I dictated this comment, and it missed that I had said “he poked me.“ Wish I could’ve edited it.
I have three little dots to the right-hand side of the post, and one of the options that show up when I click on them is 'edit.' Sometimes it is only there when I am posting from the computer and not on the phone.
Doesn't work on mobile. The Substack mobile app bites a big one. Medium's mobile, OTOH, app is the cat's balls. You can do almost everything on it. Start and edit articles, edit comments, etc etc.
Use your phone’s browser for substack commenting, through the comments at the bottom of the article so your phone doesn’t open the app. Agreed the substack app blows!
Another maneuver I hear/read all the time from the type of 'leftist' you describe here - whenever someone brings up an uncomfortable tradeoff or constraint, they're accused by this person of lacking "political imaginaiton" or something silimar. It's a neat little trick. You simultaneously frame yourself as a visionary and absolve yourself from dealing with the world as we really find it.
I feel like I used to fit into this space when I was younger. Utopian situations seemed somehow very plausible to me, if I could only explain to my elders how they'd lost the ability to look at things anew, and that if they just listened to me, I could reignite some spark in them and make them see it was not just possible, but easy, to remake the world in some obviously better way.
But the reality, obviously, was that I just didn't understand the complexities of the issues I was talking about, or the reality that even if my solutions might be achievable if we all committed ourselves to it, that this would never happen. That we wouldn't ever commit ourselves to it the way we would need to in order to succeed. And so really, even things that are possible in theory and in practice, are in that other way impossible.
“Instead of being involuntarily treated, people with severe mental illness should live independent and autonomous lives of freedom and self-direction in Candyland". I find smug assertations about the severely cognitively impaired equally frustrating - the belief that living in the community should mean the freedom to have //zero restrictions on independent living// even when some restrictions (locks on bathroom cabinets, for instance!) are necessary to protect the lives of customers/ residents.
For some of the people I have known who care about this issue, it seems they see in a strict dichotomy: Either you are locking up everyone, or you must allow them to be free to stay, even if that means dying, on the street. The idea that yes, there must be sufficient money and facilities for those who need and choose them, but there needs to be alternatives for those who are severely impaired and cannot make rational choices. Are there gradations of illness? Of course, but lumping everyone in together, and forcing those who are unable to, to make choices of such importance, is cruel, and in its own way overly controlling.
They haven't yet passed this, free to choose what's best for yourself, idea down to childhood, but that might not be too far off.
I would quibble with this, however, "There is no issue on which there is more resistance to alternative opinion" Speaking up for Palestinian rights are probably right up there, in not being allowed to be expressed, which is another aspect of 'resistance to alternative opinion.'
There are certainly anarchist minded people, some of whom I've met, who view even the parent/child dichotomy as a pernicious form of control and wish to do away with it. I have feeling that 95% of them are not parents.
Not only are they not parents, one hopes, but they don't understand biology or cognitive development. Let's make sure they are the ones making policy decisions!
They are ideologues with all the dangers that ideological purity entails.
I dunno, when the parents are religious it is a pernicious form of control. But the answer to this is to sterilize religious people, especially Southern Baptists - not get rid of parental rights.
It should be kept in mind that some of these vocal online anarchist types who think the parent/child relationship is inherently abusive are literal children, Anarchists against bedtime and all that.
I'm not a lefty/liberal, I'm a libertarian that used to consider himself right of center, but now since the damn right has gone kaflooey, I don't know what the hell to call myself.
The first time I read something you wrote about involuntary treatment, the libertarian in me was a little put off. But, you had some persuasive arguments, so I didn't dismiss it out of hand.
Over the years, as I've read more of your stuff on mental illness, I've become convinced that you are on the right side of this. So, although I'm not your target audience for this argument, you won me over anyway.
Thanks for continuing to write and advocate for the seriously psychotic. This isn't about the cute Invisible Rabbit sort of thing, it's the schizophrenic who thinks the zombies are after him and he's got to protect himself.
The people Freddie who are against involuntary institutionalization don't have seriously mentally ill family who are a danger to themselves and others. We get it.
Access to housing will improve the marginal cases, but it didn't keep my nephew from lighting a can of gas in his bedroom because he thought he was a machine. It didn't keep him from starving himself or leaving the hospital to put dirt on his 3rd degree burns so they would heal.
There is also a need for step down assisted living facilities for the chronic acute psychotics who need help staying on their meds and living a functional life. Absolutely, people should live in a least restrictive environment, but there are times for involuntary commitment.
"Yes, a lot of conservatives would close every shelter and send every homeless person to a penal colony, turn them into Soylent Green, if they could. Conservatives are inhumane and wrong. That’s a given."
It is? Really? How did you form this opinion stated as fact? I'm genuinely interested to know.
I'm a conservative living in a conservative town and I've only ever seen and heard conservatives A. donate to and volunteer at the homeless shelters their churches support and B. express that we should reopen inpatient care centers--what used to be called asylums in the Bad Old Days--with modern reforms and methods (no one is talking about chaining people to beds in Kirkbrides) so that the mentally ill who comprise a large majority of the homeless can live in safe and sanitary conditions at least, receive treatment at best, and hopefully help keep our communities safer in the process. That is what conservatives actually say, to my awareness. Maybe there are some very-online so-called conservatives saying "turn the homeless into Nutraloaf" around somewhere that I haven't seen.
I'm sure you don't care to hear this but you are in way more agreement with me and my fellow righty travelers than with your socialist cohort.
And yet, I hear an awful lot of progressives make excuses for libertine culture including unfettered drug use and pretending that this has nothing to do with mental illness or homelessness, but I would still never say something as intellectually lazy and pointlessly antagonistic as "Liberals are inhumane and wrong. They would get every person experiencing psychic pain of some kind hooked on freely available fentanyl and sleeping in their own shit on the street if they could."
Lot of other good stuff in this piece though. Especially your frustration with the negative influence of the leftist mindset and attitude on mental health care. I have a child with a diagnosis and was lucky to find a no-nonsense therapist but it took several false starts with duds to get to someone who could help us.
I think the typical response, though I don't know that it's actually true, and may just be more of an assumption, is that republican lawmakers are thought to consistently balk at the idea of increasing public funding for mental health initiatives. That this is a thing that happens only by the will of democrats.
I'm not sure that's true. This isn't something I pay attention to. But I wouldn't be surprised by it either.
I just shook my head when I read that line.
This caricature of a conservative is (hopefully!) taken in ironic metaphor, but it really just sticks out so much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html
I'm with you here. I wonder if Freddie knows any conservatives in real life.
Well, you're not the target audience here. The target audience is left-leaning people who, believing that people who think like themselves are smarter, will give FdB's views more credence if they see he also believes that conservatives are Bad (TM).
That’s what I figured as well. But it still feels gratuitous against his crossover readers. As long as the arguments are good enough, I’ll deal with it.
Precisely! The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress requires that Freddie establish his position in this manner. I like to believe that in his heart of hearts he knows that is BS, but given his stated objective to try to influence those on the Left, he has no choice.
There's definitely common ground to be found between progressives and conservatives on this issue. That's especially true for the small but mighty group that aligns itself with the American Solidarity Party
I mean, this is very obviously poetic license. He means "republicans won't raise taxes a single cent to put more money into caring for the homeless or mentally ill".
If you're on the left, then you'll argue that this is tantamount to letting them die. If you're on the right, then I suppose private charity or churches or something will take care of it?
That one paragraph wasn’t what this essay was about at all, nor was it about you or how you live your life as a Conservative. It’s called flourish or hyperbole to make for an interesting read. Obviously, Conservatives/the right runs the gamut of policy and personal positions, just like the left should.
That the first comment I had to read on this excellent piece was a “but not all of us!” whinge fest is so tiresome, but not surprising.
It was crappy "flourish" or "hyperbole" and was unnecessary and distracting to his larger points; I pay my money and I get to give feedback; you'll be ok
The Candyland-with-Housing-First scenario is playing out in real-time in San Francisco and it's an exercise in can-kicking. Even if you can get people off the streets into SROs, what happens is that the violently mentally ill ones just make life hell for the ones whom that kind of housing can help. Setting little fires, ensuring the place is filled with rodents, chasing other residents down the halls with knives... and if your response is "well arson and knife threats are crimes!" then you're just wanting them locked up but in jail rather than treatment, which is appropriate but at odds with the no-involuntary-treatment aspect.
It is ultimately more humane for some individuals and (in my view, more importantly) better for the rest of us if some people are just committed to institutions against their will. It must be done humanely, carefully, and with few expenses spared. I feel the same way about prison: there should be more of it and it should be vastly safer, more humane, and better-equipped than it is now. The alternative is a kind of benign cruelty to the people under society's care and a chaotic environment for the rest of us.
Since involuntary treatment centers will host a disproportionate number of people of color, liberals will never get behind them, least they be labeled bigots that want to lock up brown people. It doesn't matter that the social and environmental factors that contributed to this endpoint are really what should be of concern and the work of liberals to reverse; liberals would rather eliminate the structures that display the inequity of the system's endpoints than critically understand and work on the upstream factors.
I'm curious - what's your basis for asserting that "...involuntary treatment centers will host a disproportionate number of people of color..."? It's not obvious to me that POC's tend to suffer from severe mental illnesses that would require involuntary commitment at a higher rate than the general population.
I feel pretty broadly supportive of these ideas, though I do think a lot of the actual historical record of sanitariums is easy to find and not great. I’d like to have a how can we do this in a way which isn’t eternal purgatory and making sure mildly neurotic or just plain annoying people. Like perhaps these are all overblown fears but they do creep up for me.
Like I’d want to know more about what this looks like as a day to day part of government and less about should we have institutions like this.
What's the clinical evidence for the success of involuntary commitment? I've read all of Freddie's pieces on this (I think), but I can't recall him citing clinical evidence on its success. This persuasive logical and moral case ultimately rests on the assumption it works and would work for the patients.
I mean, yes, you want it to work for the patients, but then also need to define 'works' in that case. Works better as for their safety? Works better for their overall mental health? The other component, of course, is whether it works better for the rest of society, and based on how things are going now, that doesn't seem a super high bar to clear.
Even if involuntary commitment does not solve the root problem of the insanity, it will at least prevent them from wandering about pushing old ladies in front of trains, leaving dirty needles in public parks, and getting stabbed to death by young men driven to a fury that this crazy fucker flashed their little sisters.