Fast forward 30 years, and all the state hospitals are closed. Mentally sick people are left to live on the streets. Meanwhile our culture gets sicker and sicker. Thank you for invoking God.
During this limbo, people are at great risk for exploitation as well as avoidable catastrophes due to simply being invisible during their decline. Rather than willful neglect, there is simply nobody there with assigned duty to steer folks on the least unhappy path.
Ironically, people with mental illnesses appear to be much more likely to develop dementia too. So they can experience multiple flavors of this tragedy.
Sane or not a person is a person and not a property. Others shouldn't decide your fate without your consent unless your fate affects others. Cruelty disguised as charity is not right. But by default opt-in seems reasonable. If even euthanasia is popular, I hope my comment isn't too extreme or controversial.
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.
Personally I find your stance far more judgmental than mine; no one needs to 'justify' to someone else why they will or will not commit suicide. It's not even for me to justify or not when someone else does that and I reject your allegation I've done so.
I can't honestly say I know that living in a psychosis (medicated or not) is always better than dying. I defer that judgement to the owner of the body contemplating suicide. Personally no I would not stop the bleeding if asked not to, whether their choice was rational or not. I believe consent and personal choices trump my feelings or trauma from past experiences, even if it turns out the choice of others may be misplaced.
It would be odd indeed if it was OK to stop the dying only if they intentionally performed the action that led to their (imminent) death, but not OK to stop the dying if it was caused by something like a disease.
What is this theoretical individual losing if we help them? What is the society losing if we act to help?
Sadly that is not the reality we live in. The dictator, in this case is New York and various government entities. A government notorious for putting mentally ill in wards where people are "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo." [0] Without magic wands, the doctors are not always returning them to neurotypical condition, but rather often some other, perhaps clinically more palatable often drug-induced different mental state. There is often no neurotypical state the wand can be waved to, and often the decision for suicide overlaps between "ill" ad not ill persons particularly when they're subjected to indefinite stays in facilities under conditions of sexual abuse such as historically found in New York mental wards. Hell I might argue it may be cruel to stop someone from committing suicide to avoid being "helped" by New York.
That is, we are dealing with gritty, dirty reality where the mentally ill entity that is the state of New York, itself unqualified in its mental facilities, has a history of sexually and physically abusing people [0, but that's not all] to "protect" them from their own mental illness/suicide etc. Even if the consent argument fails on merits (I disagree), I argue the decision cannot and should not rest on the state in non-criminal concerns of imposing force on the ill (and notwithstanding the dystopic notion of government entities choosing who meets often poorly defined mental diseases).
With the state totally unqualified, and the individual on his own on the street often with family far removed, I defer to his perhaps ill consent. Notwithstanding, of course all help that can be offered should be.
I do not think the alternative society that say maximizes certain utilities at the cost of consent is wrong per se as long as it's possible to freely enter/exit such a society, I just find it incompatible with my values. While I disagree with the notion of stopping someone who has asked his/her respects to be honored in regard to suicide, I don't think it's some moral failing if a private individual makes an in-the-moment reaction to stop them. It's pretty much human instinct to try to preserve innocent life of those around us, so hopefully it hasn't been read that I think you're a bad person or something if you see someone cutting themselves and you stop them.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the institution in 1965 and proclaimed that individuals in the overcrowded facility were "living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo" and offered a series of recommendations for improving conditions.
Shortly thereafter, in early 1972, Geraldo Rivera, then an investigative reporter for WABC-TV in New York, conducted a series of investigations at Willowbrook uncovering a host of deplorable conditions, including overcrowding, inadequate sanitary facilities, and physical and sexual abuse of residents by members of the school's staff.
You have already heard all the unsolicited opinions and suggestions from people who have no fucking clue what you're going through or what 6oige been through. You have been told "just do X, Y, Z" and have been given countless resources both local and national that others think would help you. You tried contacting a few and they were too demanding, demeaning, or discriminating.
You spent a lot of time learning helplessness even as you became self sufficient to the best of your ability. It wasn't enough either way. Nobody wanted to help you, they just wanted to tell you that they want to, and you discovered that you don't even want their help anyway because it comes with caveats and requirements that you simply cannot tolerate or meet.
You found a way to stay connected and survive despite all this. You know you can take care of yourself. You know you are worth someone's effort and time, but you can't find that someone. Every time you think you do, they fuck you over in some way.
The tiny things added up. A broken this, a missed that, a forgotten something by someone. Dominoes fell. There are plenty of individuals at fault but it's mostly the systems, or The System. The World Should Be Better, but it's not. People are assholes, churches and charities are grifters, there's no hope for those who proffer hope. You're right.
You're right. You're on your own. You're better than all of them.
Prove it.
Workin' on it to the best of my ability. 'Tis taking far longer than I'd hoped, and all the while the pain and lack of sleep drives me slowly insane… It's a race against time, and so far time is winning. Ah well… Live alone, die alone, even surrounded by 8 billion others… C'est la vie…
He was allowed to go on like this for years because his brother was very wealthy and was generous with the school administrators.
My last year there, the dorm was slated to be torn down and replaced with a much larger one. His brother had to come and take him away.
A few months later I saw him sitting on a bench and he looked like a completely different person. Clean shaven, put together. He told me the time he spent living in the storage closet was horrible and he wished his brother had forced him into treatment years earlier.
I find myself utterly incompatible in living in such a society and I've spent much of my life seeking other people and locations that eschew such violence
Also If we're going by someone with compromised mental faculties, I would say an organization (state of New York) who physically and/or sexually abuses the disabled* is not fit to make these decisions. The New York State government has proven themselves to have compromised mental faculties and thus unable to make these decisions to violently/forcibly institutionalize the portion of 'mentally ill' adults who don't aggress upon others. In part New York paired down their institutions because they were such terrible places for these people to be, often worse than in the gutter with teeth rotting.
IMO even the disabled, especially if they are not acting in a criminal capacity, should be asked for their consent before violently being forced into institutions of physical and sexual abuse for which New York is known.
*grep for my below comment about Willowbrook State School where we discover the (mentally disabled) children you worry so much about are actually abused by New York when institutionalized.
You don't draw child's line at merely being to express their desires, why would you do so for an adult?
If I were a child of sufficient age to express desires I would rather beg in the streets in a state of psychosis than be in the institutions such as New York's Willowbrook State School.
In any case, it's shifting the goalposts. Now we are talking about particular states depriving people from agency, in the previous comment you were talking about a mentally unwell person being categorically entitled to their agency...
I personally think it's a two way street, with 2 inflection points. If someone depends on welfare state in any significant degree, it should be valid to deprive them of a little bit of agency, since it's sorta indicative of them not being capable of good decisions. Kinda like teenagers in the child analogy. If someone depends on welfare state to a large degree and also STILL cannot keep it together in terms of committing crimes / being an active menace to others, it should be valid to deprive them of a lot of agency. Kinda like 3 year olds.
At any rate in context of the article, I think agency should be proportional to responsibility. NYC should just be tough on crime in this case, and any mental health defense should be conditional on losing agency. If you are mentally healthy enough to refuse to be committed, you are mentally healthy enough to be held responsible and go to jail.