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And no court in this country has ever even suggested that a mentally ill homeless person who sits in his own feces all day can't be forced into treatment You'd

And no court in this country has ever even suggested that a mentally ill homeless person who sits in his own feces all day can't be forced into treatment You'd have to make the case that such behavior poses imminent threat of harm to himself or others to "force him into treatment". Good luck with that.

wahern 8y ago
Again, no court has ever said that imminent harm is the constitutional standard. Imminent harm (or similar wording) is what the ACLU and other groups lobbied for and got in most states in the 1970s and later, and is a big reason the U.S. has so many mentally ill homeless slowly dying on the streets. More recently a few states have changed their legislation to loosen the standard. For example, in Oregon you can be involuntarily committed if because of mental illness you're "unable to provide for basic personal needs like health and safety." Much like with the recent crime wave, mentally ill homeless is a fixable problem, or at least we can do much better. We don't need to return to the 1950s when undesirables were housed in mental hospitals. The abuses were real. But the reaction was too extreme. There's plenty of room for moving back in the other direction without creating the potential for widespread abuse. Not letting sick people rot on the streets is hardly a slippery slope to hospitalizing and drugging non-conformists. There's a universe of possibilities between where we're at now and where we were when O'Connor v. Donaldson was decided in 1975. Again, neither Donaldson[1] nor any other court opinion set the bar at imminent harm, serious harm, or anything similar. Rather, it was simply expedient to toss everybody out on the street while also feeling good about ourselves for increasing everybody's "freedom". [1] Donaldson was a functioning schizophrenic. He lived in an apartment, alone, in Philadelphia and got by without trouble for years. Though sick he was still able to care for himself. He visited his parents in Florida and his father called the cops and had him involuntary committed because of his paranoid ramblings. He was hospitalized for 15 years without any doctor so much as suggesting he couldn't return to the stable life he had before. That was a terrible injustice, but hardly justification for the extreme reforms that came afterward.

wahern 8y ago

Again, no court has ever said that imminent harm is the constitutional standard. Imminent harm (or similar wording) is what the ACLU and other groups lobbied for and got in most states in the 1970s and later, and is a big reason the U.S. has so many mentally ill homeless slowly dying on the streets. More recently a few states have changed their legislation to loosen the standard. For example, in Oregon you can be involuntarily committed if because of mental illness you're "unable to provide for basic personal needs like health and safety." Much like with the recent crime wave, mentally ill homeless is a fixable problem, or at least we can do much better. We don't need to return to the 1950s when undesirables were housed in mental hospitals. The abuses were real. But the reaction was too extreme. There's plenty of room for moving back in the other direction without creating the potential for widespread abuse. Not letting sick people rot on the streets is hardly a slippery slope to hospitalizing and drugging non-conformists. There's a universe of possibilities between where we're at now and where we were when O'Connor v. Donaldson was decided in 1975. Again, neither Donaldson[1] nor any other court opinion set the bar at imminent harm, serious harm, or anything similar. Rather, it was simply expedient to toss everybody out on the street while also feeling good about ourselves for increasing everybody's "freedom". [1] Donaldson was a functioning schizophrenic. He lived in an apartment, alone, in Philadelphia and got by without trouble for years. Though sick he was still able to care for himself. He visited his parents in Florida and his father called the cops and had him involuntary committed because of his paranoid ramblings. He was hospitalized for 15 years without any doctor so much as suggesting he couldn't return to the stable life he had before. That was a terrible injustice, but hardly justification for the extreme reforms that came afterward.