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.)