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Comment by brianmcconnell | Hacker News Reader

Actually, what _you_ should do is have first hand experience of dealing with a good friend in the midst of a severe drug addiction crisis (who can't phone mommy and daddy for help with rehab). It was impossible to get him committed for any length of time, even after he set fire to someone's house. He would have been way better off if he had been on lock down for 3 to 6 months, but instead had to completely destroy himself, lose everything, get thrown in jail, etc. He's just lucky he didn't end up in our shadow mental health system also known as state prison, which happens to an awful lot of people whose only crime is to be mentally ill and poor.

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The ACLU was pivotal in forcing through the policy changes. They even take credit for it on their website: https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-mental-institutions?...

I do have first hand experience with a family member who needed real mandatory mental help. We could not do anything for years until she tried to kill herself.

Ideological organizations often lose sight of basic human realities, or fight to end one ill only to birth another.

I was born in a country where declaring people insane and involuntarily committing them to mental hospitals was standard operating procedure for the secret police to shut up dissidents.

I think America has the right idea here, frankly. You should not be imprisoned by the state unless you are openly convicted of a crime.

The evidence seems to suggest that the people the state wants out of general circulation fare no better when they're tossed in prison or otherwise hounded/destroyed.

You also require doctors acting as criminals, with weak oversight to make your fears come true, in addition to a criminal government. If a government goes really wrong, and wants you out of the way, they'll get their way. Jean Seberg for example, didn't need to be locked up to be destroyed. We didn't need to lock people in hospitals to ruin their lives, we just used a blacklist.

You shouldn't be so frightened by your personal history that you lose sight of the fact that the root cause is a government out of control, not the means they use.

Then America should stop throwing people in prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade to pay for the goods and services the homeless receive from government organizations.

You can't impose authoritarianism to force productive people to support the poor, and then act sanctimonious about committing the mentally ill and drug addicted who contribute nothing to the economy.

This literally only makes sense if money/the economy is the only thing you care about.

Refraining from throwing people who have not violated anyone's rights in prison makes sense if you care about human rights.

You seem to throw all concern for human rights out the window when the object is to take someone's money from them.

Or... y'know... I care about people as a whole more than I care about a rich minority's desire to become a bit richer.

The interests of 'people as a whole' can be used to justify both (compulsory treatment leads to less drug abuse and fewer homeless, compulsory income redistribution leads to more funding for the homeless, respectively), so really what you're saying is that it's okay to throw rich people in prison, but not poor people.

That's what your 'value system' comes down to. Knee-jerk judgments on moral value and rights based on whether a person is successful.

It's very easy to pay taxes. People do it all the time, and it's pretty well documented how to do it. Worst case scenario, you miss something and pay a bit more than you might otherwise have to. I don't know of anyone who's paid taxes properly and been thrown in prison for paying taxes. Hell, if you look like you might be trying to make an honest effort to pay taxes and got it wrong, you can pay them after someone catches you!

It's not very easy not to have a mental illness. It's not something you choose to do. See the difference? One is putting you in prison for something you very easily could've avoided - the other is putting you in prison (because that's what compulsory treatment really is) for being a human being.

Here come the rationalizations for your favored brand of authoritarianism.

Human rights violators always think that their particular authoritarianism is justified.

It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't simultaneously admonish those who support authoritarian laws to force those who are massively abusing drugs to the detriment of themselves and the rest of society into treatment.

I think we will disagree forevermore on whether or not property and money are the most important things in the world.

No, we disagree on whether it's okay to throw someone in prison for not handing over their money to you, and whether it's okay to rationalize this form of authoritarianism, while admonishing the much more sensible authoritarian policy of forcing those with severe drug addictions to stop putting themselves and the rest of society in danger by getting treatment.

Reasonably sure we don't. We disagree mostly that your specific definition of property is a thing that should be considered a human right at all.

Unlike most other human rights, the only reason that property is considered one is to prop up capitalism and prevent experimenting with alternatives. Property doesn't exist to the extent it does today without Government intervention - the alternative is that nobody owns anything aside from that which they can defend personally by force. Property is thus subsidised by Government - Government says that in return for taxes, they'll keep some concept of property separate from the concept of whether or not you happen to have enough firepower to defend it. This, of course, doesn't actually work unless the Government is powerful enough to take down any group which might want to steal your property.

There are various alternatives to this Government-subsidised definition of property, some of which have been tried out small-scale, some larger scale. I'm not really sure why one specific definition is encoded into your definition of human rights (which, of course, doesn't match any human rights treaty currently in force anywhere).

On the bright side, with enough firepower, you can defend yourself from the Government and essentially become your own country and do whatever you want. Wee!

No we disagree on whether throwing a person in prison for refusing to hand over something they receive in private trade is a human rights violation.

It goes beyond even this. Income and sales tax laws require a person to surrender their privacy rights, and disclose how much currency they received in private trade, and from what sources, or be imprisoned. You don't consider this blatant authoritarian violation of privacy rights to be a human rights violation.

You define actions that are clearly human rights violations as not being so, because your ethics are purely designed to rationalise your political ideology, as opposed to consistently defending people's rights.

You're also not above misconstruing the debate and misframing your correspondent's position in an attempt to disparage them while evading their criticisms of your position.

So you only drive on toll roads and went to a private school?

Edit: Deleted my earlier comment, as I misread yours.

Regarding what you said: The GP is not disputing the need for mental health institutions. He is pointing out that the ones that existed were horrible, to the point that closing them down was better than running them.

At the moment, too much of mental health is being handled by prisons. Whenever I read from people who study the problem, they all agree that:

1. It shouldn't be the prisons' responsibility.

2. The prisons are doing a better job than the mental institutions that were shut down.

Your first point is correct, but your second lacks clarity of insight.

If one were to read the history behind why the Reagan administration dismantled the mental health system, one would know that, in fact, what Reagan allowed to happen was a state sponsored ignorance of block grants that were initially allotted for the purpose of establishing local administration of mental health care. Reagan's mouthpieces said this was a wiser (letting states handle the money) way than Federal action to implement the plan Kennedy had initiated after witnessing his sister's incapacitation from her own 'treatment'.

The Reagan bunch then turned their heads and coughed while states deliberately ignored the intent of the money and spent it elsewhere, and did not, in fact, build mental institutions for short term treatment and release (with periodic checkups) that Kennedy's plan had described in exquisite detail.

To malign the intent and say that prisons are somehow better than the mental health treatment that was being administered is to suggest there was no alternative, which is implicit in your defense, though certainly not directly expressed. I seriously doubt you have spent any time in a correctional facility or mental hospital because you would then know that prisons are quite literally the worst place for a mentally ill person to be. Better they be homeless an under the care of the shelters and soup kitchens than locked in a concrete cell with hundreds, if not thousands, of undernourished, maltreated, and relatively unsupervised bangers.

There is the slimmest veneer of an attempt to rehabilitate addicts and/or treat mental illness within these facilities, but God knows there have been PLENTY of attempts for several decades to realign the institutions such that they are congruent with our understanding of what constitutes psychological healing.

It truly WAS Reagan's administration that put the decision to opt-out of locally 'sourced' mental health treatment in ultra conservative governor's and their respective cabinet advisors' hands.

Let us not obfuscate what the worst ever was with what may have been were cooler heads to have prevailed.

And what you should do is have first hand experience dealing with a poor or non-white or politically active person locked up in a hospital an declared insane for backtalking to a police officer or government official.

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