10 ms·

New York City Will Hospitalize More Mentally Ill People Involuntarily

84 points by latchkey 4y ago

latchkey 4y ago
https://archive.ph/GHIi7 https://archive.ph/GHIi7
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas Some more cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases_involving_mental_health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_...
- mwint 4y ago
  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.
  - mdorazio 4y ago
    California loves doing this as well, especially with gun laws.
    - standardUser 4y ago
      Many states did this habitually for decades with restrictive abortion laws.
      - DataOverload 4y ago
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    It does not seem like New York City or New York State enacted any laws in this case.
    - mwint 4y ago
      Law, policy, directive, order, emergency action, etc. All boils down to “government is doing something with force of law” and is reviewable by SCOTUS.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    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.
  - singleshot_ 4y ago
    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).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - setr 4y ago
      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.
      - singleshot_ 4y ago
        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.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    AFAIK in new york the wards were closed largely in response to abhorrent conditions exposed in a documentary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School and other locations.
- infecto 4y ago
  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.
- gpm 4y ago
  O'Connor v. Donaldson (per wikipedia) > 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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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.
    - gpm 4y ago
      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...
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        If NYC can pull this off, I wonder what has been stopping it and all the other US cities for all these years.
        panzagl 4y ago
        It's expensive and no one wants to pay for it.
        lazyasciiart 4y ago
        Same thing stopping NYC. They don't have the psych beds available to put these people in.
standardUser 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- volkk 4y ago
  im pretty concerned about hospitals. a lot are operating on an essentially skeleton crew. how will this new influx affect them?
norwalkbear 4y ago
Highly illegal, this will loose in the courts
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  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.
ahoy 4y ago
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.
- asdff 4y ago
  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
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    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.
    - baremetal 4y ago
      you mention abuse, then don't give any examples. surely giving anti-psychotic drugs isn't tantamount to abuse in severe cases.
    - asdff 4y ago
      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. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/tent-fires-are-on-the-rise-in-homeless-encampments-of-l-a-s-skid-row.html 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.
ipnon 4y ago
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?
- badcppdev 4y ago
  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?
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  There's a great Slate Star Codex post on this narrative: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-prison-and-mental-illness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-p...
- qohen 4y ago
  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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalization_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalization_in_the_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation
slenk 4y ago
I truly don't understand how this is legal. They can just call someone "too" mentally ill and lock them up?
- ramesh31 4y ago
  > 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.
dr_ 4y ago
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. 50 more psych beds won’t cut it.
- latchkey 4y ago
  I felt like the 50 beds was added at the end as a sort of /s.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  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. It is all so idiotic.
  - voakbasda 4y ago
    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?
rsynnott 4y ago
> 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - ihsw 4y ago
- twelve40 4y ago
  NYC has the population size of Austria, so he probably has one or two more things to deal with other than opening supermarkets.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  Mayors have real power in some cities, ceremonial power in others.
grumpymouse 4y ago
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.
- notch656a 4y ago
  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.
  - rmah 4y ago
    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.
    - notch656a 4y ago
      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.
      - rmah 4y ago
        Well, that's an opinion, I guess.
      - 4y ago
purpleblue 4y ago
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.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  >This is good. We need more of this, 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.
  - purpleblue 4y ago
    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.
    - unethical_ban 4y ago
      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.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
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. If only we had a test for strength of free will…
- JaceLightning 4y ago
  That is not what this article is about. It's about hospitalizing people who are not having a medical emergency against their will.
  - carewell 4y ago
    That is not what the article is about. It's about hospitalizing people who are severely mentally ill. How is that not a medical emergency?
pasttense01 4y ago
"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.
- gpm 4y ago
  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.
throwayyy479087 4y ago
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.
treebeard901 4y ago
This is great. Hope it has some neutral oversight for the diagnosis and treatment instead of being a life long incarceration with no due process.
djaouen 4y ago
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.
my_city 4y ago
When will the americans revolt against the totalitarian, authoritarian regime of the capitalist class?
aingreansaten 4y ago
geebee 4y ago
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. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros
- carewell 4y ago
  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".
- mancerayder 4y ago
  > 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?
mancerayder 4y ago
Phase I was to throw them in the asylums (up until the 70's-80's) 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]

84 points by latchkey 4y ago

https://archive.ph/GHIi7 https://archive.ph/GHIi7

> 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas Some more cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases_involving_mental_health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_...

mwint 4y ago
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.
- mdorazio 4y ago
  California loves doing this as well, especially with gun laws.
  - standardUser 4y ago
    Many states did this habitually for decades with restrictive abortion laws.
    - DataOverload 4y ago
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  It does not seem like New York City or New York State enacted any laws in this case.
  - mwint 4y ago
    Law, policy, directive, order, emergency action, etc. All boils down to “government is doing something with force of law” and is reviewable by SCOTUS.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  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.
- singleshot_ 4y ago
  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).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - setr 4y ago
    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.
    - singleshot_ 4y ago
      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.
- notch656a 4y ago
  AFAIK in new york the wards were closed largely in response to abhorrent conditions exposed in a documentary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School and other locations.
infecto 4y ago
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.
gpm 4y ago
O'Connor v. Donaldson (per wikipedia) > 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.
- bombcar 4y ago
  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.
  - gpm 4y ago
    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...
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      If NYC can pull this off, I wonder what has been stopping it and all the other US cities for all these years.
      - panzagl 4y ago
        It's expensive and no one wants to pay for it.
      - lazyasciiart 4y ago
        Same thing stopping NYC. They don't have the psych beds available to put these people in.

standardUser 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
volkk 4y ago
im pretty concerned about hospitals. a lot are operating on an essentially skeleton crew. how will this new influx affect them?

norwalkbear 4y ago

Highly illegal, this will loose in the courts

throwayyy479087 4y ago
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.

ahoy 4y ago

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.

asdff 4y ago
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
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  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.
  - baremetal 4y ago
    you mention abuse, then don't give any examples. surely giving anti-psychotic drugs isn't tantamount to abuse in severe cases.
  - asdff 4y ago
    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. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/tent-fires-are-on-the-rise-in-homeless-encampments-of-l-a-s-skid-row.html 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.

ipnon 4y ago

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?

badcppdev 4y ago
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?
amadeuspagel 4y ago
There's a great Slate Star Codex post on this narrative: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-prison-and-mental-illness/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/07/reverse-voxsplaining-p...
qohen 4y ago
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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalization_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalization_in_the_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

slenk 4y ago

I truly don't understand how this is legal. They can just call someone "too" mentally ill and lock them up?

ramesh31 4y ago
> 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.

dr_ 4y ago

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. 50 more psych beds won’t cut it.

latchkey 4y ago
I felt like the 50 beds was added at the end as a sort of /s.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
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. It is all so idiotic.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  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?

rsynnott 4y ago

> 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.

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- ihsw 4y ago
twelve40 4y ago
NYC has the population size of Austria, so he probably has one or two more things to deal with other than opening supermarkets.
deleted 4y ago
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unethical_ban 4y ago
Mayors have real power in some cities, ceremonial power in others.

grumpymouse 4y ago

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.

notch656a 4y ago
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.
- rmah 4y ago
  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.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    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.
    - rmah 4y ago
      Well, that's an opinion, I guess.
    - 4y ago

purpleblue 4y ago

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.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago
>This is good. We need more of this, 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.
- purpleblue 4y ago
  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.
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    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.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

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. If only we had a test for strength of free will…

JaceLightning 4y ago
That is not what this article is about. It's about hospitalizing people who are not having a medical emergency against their will.
- carewell 4y ago
  That is not what the article is about. It's about hospitalizing people who are severely mentally ill. How is that not a medical emergency?

pasttense01 4y ago

"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.

gpm 4y ago
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.

throwayyy479087 4y ago

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.

treebeard901 4y ago

This is great. Hope it has some neutral oversight for the diagnosis and treatment instead of being a life long incarceration with no due process.

djaouen 4y ago

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.

my_city 4y ago

When will the americans revolt against the totalitarian, authoritarian regime of the capitalist class?

aingreansaten 4y ago

geebee 4y ago

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. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros

carewell 4y ago
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".
mancerayder 4y ago
> 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?

mancerayder 4y ago

Phase I was to throw them in the asylums (up until the 70's-80's) 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]