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Comment by isitmadeofglass | Hacker News Reader

> what about the false positives (people who get forced treatment while claiming that they are not ill and don't need it and then that turns out to be actually true).

We have a criminal system even though the exact same is true in some crimes.

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I will say this, I grew up in a time of asylums and I lived thru their gutting of them with the Reagan administration and back then law enforcement was very different it did not become militarized until the LA bank shootout and some other events in the same timeframe. To say it was a different world would be an understatement. In that world false positives where rare, usually there was a history of issue as well as close family that agreed that it was for their good.

Nowadays law enforcement does not know your name, they suspect you from first contact and family is not as tight knit as it was. I would be very leery of asylums in present society, due to the many ways in which society has changed.

The justice system has nontrivial checks on the power of the state to incarcerate people and it already has massive problems, what would a system without those checks do?

Probably similar things as the civil law parts. See the flagrant abuses of things like restraining orders and red flag laws in divorces, or civil asset forfeiture, etc.

Yeah, but there you come out the other end with your mind intact. These forcibly prescribed treatments have side effects that can do irreversible damage. Can't get that appeal hearing if you can't think straight anymore.

Highly debatable that regular prison leaves your mind intact.

Very true. Although the scope is quite different between the conditioning you face in a prison and the chemical alteration of various medications. Generally, one can be resisted or controlled, whole the other cannot.

Agreed, it's basically the same argument as against the death penalty. Can't exonerate yourself if you're dead, can't be found mentally sound if you've been effectively lobotomized.

Obviously psychiatry has come a long way since lobotomy, but it doesn't have a great history when it comes to treating unwilling patients.

If a mentally unwell person is a demonstrated threat (ie commits crimes and harms/endangers people) the state already has the power to lock them up. In my view letting the state forcibly alter their brain and mind against their will is a bridge too far.

> In my view letting the state forcibly alter their brain and mind against their will is a bridge too far.

I don't share your view. It's quite clear to me that there are circumstances when a mentally-ill person benefits enormously from compulsory treatment (provided they are released; a system that rewards clinics financially for continuing to detain patients that are fit for release is a special kind of madness).

You have a judicial system in place to prevent these false positives.

I dont understand. Can you explain that?

In the context of this comment thread:

False positives = someone wrongly accused of a crime by the police.

After the accusation follows a trial (this is the judicial system) where the wrongly accused can prove that they in fact did not commit the crime.

Thus judicial system is setup to deal with the false positives.

That doesn't prevent the false positives, just cuts the process off before prision. And studies show that 2-10% of the incarcerated are wrongly convicted or completely innocent. Also, involuntary commitment could be a civil law which does not carry with it the same protections as criminal law, depending on how it's defined. So I'm still not seeing how this prevents false positives.

I think you have a different threshold for the word "prevent". Which is fine by me.

It sound like maybe you mean reduce, not prevent.

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