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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Which of the following statements are you advocating for:

1. There is never any reason to involuntarily commit someone

2. There are valid reasons, but there is no known diagnostic that can detect them.

3. There are valid reasons, and we can detect them, but there is no way to prevent people from involuntarily committing people for other reasons, even if we make laws and conduct audits to ensure that only valid reasons and approved diagnostics are used.

4. Something else? You just think the mentally ill are better off living in homeless camps?

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Not the person you're replying to, but I'm curious: what's wrong with position (3)? That's kinda where I am right now.

It’s pretty bleak and pessimistic for one thing. If you want to solve a problem you have to at first believe that it’s possible to solve. Otherwise, why wouldn’t you just give up?

> It’s pretty bleak and pessimistic for one thing.

So, two objections:

First, "bleak and pessimistic" or "realistic"? There are a number of rights that we guarantee specifically because we don't believe there's a good way to police bad actors without harming good actors.

Our entire justice system is built around occasionally taking the worst outcome and refusing to convict people specifically because we're so scared of how easy it would be to abuse a system where people had the power to correct those injustices.

"State power can be abused" is not really uncommon sentiment for any political group in the US, and it's a big part of our country's DNA. I'm not sure I'd phrase that as fatalistic or unhelpful, it's a big part of the backbone of our current democracy.

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Second, it might well be that the problem is solvable, but even if that's the case it doesn't mean it's wise to give abusive regimes more power right now. Having optimism about our ability to build a society that does not stigmatize mental health and does not use mental health as an excuse to harm minorities, oppressed groups, activists, or social outcasts does not preclude saying "but we clearly don't have that society yet, and right now it would be a giant disaster to give our current society this level of power, and we know from history what a society that looks like ours typically does with this kind of power."

I might be optimistic that my kid will be able to learn to drive some day. I do not express that optimism by buying them a car when they're 10 and letting them start it up and start driving down the highway unattended. I am optimistic that Flatpak sandboxing is going to eventually be good. I do not express that optimism by throwing out all of my VMs and using Flatpak as my only sandboxing tool right now. I understand that my optimism about the future does not change the current state of the world.

I am optimistic that transgender rights are going to eventually improve over time, including in states like Florida and Texas. But I am realistic about how those states are run and managed at this moment, and I am realistic about what those states will do if granted these powers.

Optimism does not require naivety.

You are not addressing my concerns and are mostly creating straw men to avoid that I am pointing out the historical, real, already evidenced harms of the proposed solution.

You are the one creating strawmen by harping on abuses from 60 years ago when I'm specifically saying don't do that.

Are you just completely against the idea of human progress? Do you think we're incapable of fixing things that were bad in the past?

Both my parents were nurses who worked in psych hospitals. I can promise you people exist who need to be in there. People who are incapable of caring for themselves. People who in some cases already committed violent crimes. We need places to care for people like this.

Yes, abuses happened. So stop abusing people, don't stop caring for people who need care.

Prisons are sometimes abusive. People are sometimes put in prison for unjust reasons. People sometimes try to make bad laws to put people in prison for shitty reasons. So should get rid of prisons altogether and just let thieves and murderers do whatever they want? That doesn't seem to be working out so well in California.

At no point did I say there were never problems with institutions. I'm saying fix the problems instead of getting rid of institutions altogether.

Now, are you saying it's not possible to fix or what?

If something goes really badly, and someone wants to try it again, the natural questions to ask that person are:

* What do you think are the reasons why it went badly last time?

* What are you proposing we do differently?

* Are you sure that they weren't already doing that last time?

* How do you think that this change would avoid things going badly again?

Could you explicitly answer those questions? Maybe I'm just bad at reading, but so far, all I can get out of your comments is that we should "make reasonable rules and follow them", but I assume that's what people thought they were doing last time, too...

I think coming up with a comprehensive mental health policy is a little beyond the scope of a HN comment, and certainly far beyond my expertise. I merely posit that such a policy could exist, and could be developed. I don't see why not.

I mean, the comments here are like "b-b-but homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness!". Right, it was, but now it's not. So it seems pretty clear that to prevent people from being institutionalized for being gay, we could simply continue to not consider it a mental illness. You know, like we're already doing. That doesn't seem very difficult.

Maybe there are other things that are considered mental illnesses that shouldn't be. If there are, we already have an example in homosexuality of how we can stop considering them mental illnesses. It's clearly a thing that's possible to do, so if necessary, let's do that.

> I think coming up with a comprehensive mental health policy is a little beyond the scope of a HN comment

True, but that's clearly not what I asked for.

> If there are, we already have an example in homosexuality of how we can stop considering them mental illnesses. It's clearly a thing that's possible to do, so if necessary, let's do that.

Also true, but (1) our understanding of what should be treated as a mental illness can regress, and (2) that's not much solace for all the people harmed between now and when we as a society agree that they shouldn't be considered mentally ill.

A few years ago a woman was murdered on the block where I worked. She was out jogging in the evening and was stabbed by a schizophrenic homeless man. The murderer had been arrested several times, they knew he was ill, but he couldn't be forced to receive treatment.

What's the solace you offer for her family? "Hey sorry your daughter got killed, but maybe people won't be unjustly institutionalized in this hypothetical scenario I dreamed up where US civil rights suddenly regresses 60 years for no reason"?

Sorry, I don't find that very compelling. I'm pretty sure we can regulate institutions better, knowing what mistakes were made in the past.

People are human, they make mistakes. Sometimes they're wrong or even malicious. Yes, some people might be harmed in institutions. But, people are also being harmed right now. There's no scenario in which there is zero harm. You try to reduce harm as much you can and evaluate and adjust along the way. That's how you make progress. If you paralyze society by demanding perfect solutions, the result is stagnation and death.

US human rights _just_ regressed less than two years ago, with limitations to access to abortion!?! Is there a need for more proof that what you dismiss as 60 years ago poor decisions is already being reimplemented?

I absolutely understand your point regarding mental illness, but so far the US don't seem to be in a good shape to handle it without SERIOUS risks to others, and on another scale than people getting stabbed randomly, which happens with our without mentally ill people (and is also a very bad thing).

Thank you. These people that demand perfection are poison to any kind of progress, and one of the reasons the US is an increasing failure. Was recently in Asia, and the contrast was clear as day.

I'm not demanding perfection. I'm literally just asking "what would be different this time", and the only answer I'm getting is "we know better this time around".

Seriously: the reason asylums were so prone to abuse in the past was not because the people running them didn't know better.

You don't think there's anything different between the 1960s and today? Like, nothing at all?

For one thing, there is a history of abuses in asylums, so people would know to look out for it. I confess I don't know every detail of the history of asylums, but hopefully we can agree:

1. Asylums existed, there was abuse

2. At some point the abuse was discovered and brought to light.

3. The people in power eventually shut down the asylums, partly because of the abuse.

So we know that some mechanism for detecting abuse existed. How about we do whatever that was earlier on and formalize it? We know that there is some authority that has the power to shut down asylums, so instead of that authority shutting them down, how about it just removes people who are committing abuse? This isn't rocket science.

Like, at some point in the past bakers would put sawdust in their bread to cut cost. Obviously, this was bad and they knew it was bad. But we didn't just say "Oh well, I guess we have to outlaw bakeries. There's no possible way we could ever stop them from putting sawdust in the bread". No, we created the FDA, started doing inspections and fining people and today you can buy bread anywhere in the US and be confident that there's no sawdust in it. Clearly, problems like this have solutions if people are willing to try instead of just giving up.

Homosexual marriage is universally legal in the States, doesn't that indicate legal precedents have changed significantly in the intervening time?

All of this is common sense, frankly.

The people arguing against you are arguing from fear and emotion. You won't convince them with logic.

Homosexuality is still on the books as a crime in the State of Texas and probably elsewhere, it's only a 2003 Supreme Court case that makes it unenforceable. A court case a lot of people on the Court wouldn't mind overturning, I might add.

You may think these things are way in the past, but to many who aren't even that grey haired it was only yesterday.

I'm not necessarily arguing for or against asylums, but just arguing what seems to be something fixed in society can easily be overly assumed as the standard. It wasn't long ago that abortions were federally protected, now it's much less so. I wouldn't assume that things always march forwards, especially in the current climate. Then again, it all depends on your point of view which way "forwards" is.

So sure, you and I here, we can agree we shouldn't just say "you're gay, therefore need to be institutionalized." But honestly, there's a lot of people still out there that think differently. And in some ways, they're gaining influence and power.

> But honestly, there's a lot of people still out there that think differently. And in some ways, they're gaining influence and power.

They're gaining influence and power, in large part, because the people who would oppose them are advocating things like letting the mentally ill live in tents on the street and do whatever they want. People rightly see that this policy produces bad results and don't support the people who advocate for the bad policy. Unfortunately, that leaves only one other choice in our two party system.

The solution is to stop supporting bad policies, and advocate for better ones instead, that fix known problems while also working to preserve peoples' rights.

Okay, come on, surely even you can see how this is the shittiest rebuttal ever.

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