>sounds like a mental health emergency Sure, you can dose him up with Haldol and solve that particular emergency. What happens when he does it again next week?

>sounds like a mental health emergency Sure, you can dose him up with Haldol and solve that particular emergency. What happens when he does it again next week? And the week after that? Persistent severe mental illness is interesting in that it's a new problem. For all of human history, severe mental illness was a death sentence. Either you'd get beaten to death by your largest neighbor for acting weird, or your village would exile you and you'd starve to death in the forest. The current compromise we've arrived at is that being crazy is not actually a crime, so you cannot be permanently imprisoned for it. So low-functioning schizophrenics cycle through mental hospitals-- they climb a lamp post and urinate on passers-by, get committed and then are put on antipsychotics, sober up, survey their surroundings and rationally conclude that inpatient mental health facilities are really awful places to be, (basically no rights or privacy, surrounded by crazy people, can't wear or handle any object that's on a very short list of approved suicide-incompatible things) and then check themselves out, which they are legally allowed to do. Then they go off their meds, (also legally allowed) and it's back to the lamp post... This continues until they accidentally walk into traffic, or are shot by a cop. It's a miserable compromise that persists because all the alternatives are even less palatable.