> His sister, Vedanta Griffith, spent nearly 16 years looking for him. He moved to Hawaii with Griffith when her husband was stationed on Oahu with the Army in 2003. He moved to the Big Island and then disappeared, while suffering mental health issues, she said.
https://www.expressnews.com/news/article/Mistaken-identity-l...
It's still unacceptable, but not quite the same story. The counterfactual would likely have had him released to the streets, continuing to suffer from mental illness.
Our unreasonable, narcissistic, excessive fear of authority is why so many mentally ill are left to rot on the streets. In fact, our culture's extreme paranoia regarding these risks seems to detrimentally manifest itself in the mentally ill, such as with paranoid schizophrenics. AFAIU, schizophrenia manifests differently in different cultures, and it manifests with particular paranoia, fear, and violence in Western societies and especially the United States. In general it seems the mentally ill often reflect and act out, in an exaggerated manner, our shared cultural fears and prejudices. For example, most of the recent anti-Asian physical assaults were committed by the mentally ill. It begs the question, is it their fault or our fault collectively?
Compare popular opinion surrounding the defund the police movement. Most people are willing to except the risk of police abuse, including those communities most at risk from abuse, given the benefit that the police provide. Opinions seem to shift when it comes to civil commitment, even though civil commitment abuses seem less common than police abuse. As a culture we seem to feel more vulnerable, perhaps because mental illness contradicts our cultural beliefs regarding autonomy and agency.
We need to get over it. The mentally ill used to be able to rely on family and community for support. But as a society we've eviscerated if not completely destroyed those support networks. Nuclear families don't have the resources to take on that burden alone. An early consequence was a shift to mental institutions while the community looked away; but then we swung wildly in the opposite direction and just dumped them out on the streets where we can't physically look away, but can still lie to ourselves about the reasons they're there (e.g. blaming income inequality). In both cases it's a failure to face our fears head-on.