There's a ton of background in this story, but very little about what the solution is, at least in detail.
There's a ton of background in this story, but very little about what the solution is, at least in detail.
We don't need to wait around for a court to indict a person for "being a crazy homeless person". That's insanely reductive to the point of absurdity.
It's not just implicit -- assault is explicitly a crime, everywhere.
In the US, there is no such concept as “implicit crime”, but, yes, some of those things are just plain explicit crimes.
> We don’t need to wait around for a court to indict a person for “being a crazy homeless person”
If you are going to treat it as a crime, then, yes, it has all the procedural safeguards generally applicable to crime.
They would be arrested based on the crime they commit, such as assault. Then the court would make a determination on their insanity plea.
Adultery and sodomy have been crimes in most civilization of history too. That doesn't mean we convict people based solely on the spirit of the law, nor ignore the principle of innocent until proven guilty.
https://thecorrespondent.com/407/people-not-pills-what-the-w...
"If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"
Plenty of homeless people who don't commit crime, you just don't notice them because they aren't bothering anyone.
It would be nice to have sufficient supply of quality mental healthcare and oversight to prevent abuse of involuntary committal, but as far as I see, that is a pipe dream.
What about a national jobs guarantee?
National healthcare that can’t bankrupt people?
I’ve met a lot of homeless people in my life, most have no use for a counselor. They’re largely uninterested in self actualization or recovery. They want safe shelter, affordable and accessible healthcare, reliable transportation, a job they can be proud of that provides for them and their family consistently. These people are gripped by despair and acting it against society at large because society has relegated them to the fringes as useless, hopeless, and expendable. Housing, healthcare, and respect for each individual human is the minimum. Just because that won’t scale does not it can be ignored. Ignoring this is how we got here. Continue ignoring it and we’ll probably see more tech bros murdered in broad daylight. We might also see the security teams of these tech bros commit a few massacres.
there are different flavors of therapy, and some may use more empirical methods than others, but there's a lot of infiltrating ideology and opinions that fight over what is and isn't science, and therefore what is and isn't empirical
but if none of this is truly empirical, the therapeutic aspects are religious
so locking people up for what are essential religious violations is way beyond illegitimate control
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment . After just one episode of telling professionals that they "heard voices", patients were diagnosed and forced to take medication despite never again showing symptoms or evidence of illness.
Once admitted and diagnosed, the pseudopatients were not able to obtain their release until they agreed with the psychiatrists that they were mentally ill and began taking antipsychotic medications,
Even if they weren't ill... the only way to get out was to lie and say they were.From the summary:
> In 2019 and 2023, historians of psychiatry published evidence that the experiment is a hoax.
And following the link:
> In The Great Pretender, a 2019 book on Rosenhan, author Susannah Cahalan questions the veracity and validity of the Rosenhan experiment. Examining documents left behind by Rosenhan after his death, Cahalan finds apparent distortion in the Science article: inconsistent data, misleading descriptions, and inaccurate or fabricated quotations from psychiatric records. Moreover, despite an extensive search, she is only able to identify two of the eight pseudopatients: Rosenhan himself, and a graduate student whose testimony is allegedly inconsistent with Rosenhan's description in the article. In light of Rosenhan's seeming willingness to bend the truth in other ways regarding the experiment, Cahalan questions whether some or all of the six other pseudopatients might have been simply invented by Rosenhan.[11][12] In February 2023, Andrew Scull of the University of California at San Diego published an article[13] in the peer-reviewed journal History of Psychiatry in support of Cahalan's allegations.
Still - it’s scary how many rights you lose once you’ve been declared unwell. We might just want to start using more recent evidence since that experiment has come under question.
It is much different today