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Comment by SamPatt | Hacker News Reader

This is some hardcore victim blaming.

The man is wrongfully incarcerated and medicated against his will for years, and your response is "if people trusted authority more this wouldn't happen."

What?

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What happened is wrong. But the reaction, including the failure by the media to properly contextualize the incident, implying that simple denials of an erroneous identity can cause people (and the state) to institutionalize you, also reflects a harmful cultural pathology. Despite all the hand-wringing, that pathology has resulted in making civil commitment and other coercive measures for mental health treatment historically difficult and exceptionally rare, with the direct consequence that I often see in various American cities mentally ill people literally, physically rotting on the street (e.g. someone living on the street, clearly suffering from severe mental illness, with gangrenous legs due to diabetes or other disease). (In rural areas it's more hidden because housing is cheaper.)

So, yeah, I think it's a serious and consequential issue. Again, the counterfactual here is the man living homeless on the street, which judging by the newspaper articles and the HN thread suggests most people were tacitly okay with--it's the status quo, afterall. That doesn't justify what happened to him; it's the reaction to the incident that is problematic--the pearl clutching, "OMG that could happen to me", "this is why we need to make it even more difficult to force treatment."

IOW, this man was victimized twice, not just once. Instead of nursing our paranoia about our own largely imagined vulnerability to state coercion, people should be asking how we can create a more proactive, more dynamic system. That may mean not only more checks & balances, but a greater allocation of power to the system, not less. (To make a technical analogy, look at CI/CD, where you get better at something by exercising it more often, not by avoiding it.)

It is completely reasonable to be concerned about what happened, particularly in light of the psychiatric communities abysmally poor track record on respecting human rights. It isn’t a “dangerous cultural pathology” or “hand wringing” or “pearl clutching”. It is quite dishonest to frame all objections in such emotionally charged language.

I also object to the idea that the fact that he is homeless is relevant. Homeless people are just as deserving as fundamental human rights as everyone else, and the magnitude of the crime is not lessor because the victim was someone defenseless.

Being able to confine people and drug them against their will without even proper oversight is way more power than anyone should have. Once the proper oversight is in place, we can talk about how to make the system more ”dynamic”, but until then it is absolute lunacy to suggest that it should have more power.

The authorities you appeal to here are evidently as delusional as this particular human canary they so confidently and cooperatively caged up.

What the authorities need is competition, or else continued abuses of their monopoly are certain.

A system that enables these kinds of outcomes should not be allowed to promote their services as helpful to people. One man's potential settlement check does not acquit them of their responsibilities.

A system that sends people to the sidewalk and then punishes them there does not need to be fed any more, it is eating plenty on its own.

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