Counterpoint: Mentally ill people have the same rights as everyone else and therefore can’t be locked up without a criminal conviction, no matter how annoying their symptoms may be.
Then we need a national version of the Baker act to commit them for their own welfare. Just because they haven’t harmed anyone else (yet) doesn’t mean allowing them to roam loose isn’t actively harming them themselves.
How about before we look into finding ways of permanently locking away mentally ill or neurodivergent people, who are already relegated as second class citizens, we find ways of shifting our civic budgetary concerns away from bloated PD coffers and into mental health and advocacy programs instead?
Yeah, no thanks. The moment you lock away groups of people “for their own good” is the moment the majority of the voting public dehumanizes them and only ever perpetuates an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality in regards to policy.
There is a real storm coming across all of the world in regards to our collective mental health crisis and we’re doing a very good job of ignoring it or thinking that reactionary policy that historically has shown to be terrible on most accounts is the best way to confront it.
This is going to play out much the same way as our climate crisis unless we start truly examining, at a policy level, why our contemporary institutions are failing us collectively.
Counterpoint: Mentally ill people have the same rights as everyone else and therefore can’t be locked up without a criminal conviction, no matter how annoying their symptoms may be.
Then we need a national version of the Baker act to commit them for their own welfare. Just because they haven’t harmed anyone else (yet) doesn’t mean allowing them to roam loose isn’t actively harming them themselves.
How about before we look into finding ways of permanently locking away mentally ill or neurodivergent people, who are already relegated as second class citizens, we find ways of shifting our civic budgetary concerns away from bloated PD coffers and into mental health and advocacy programs instead?
Why not both?
Here in Portland we’re fed up with the mentally ill self medicating on meth and fentanyl, waving axes and machetes at people.
I wish I was exaggerating.
They shouldn’t have to victimize the general public before we do something.
https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/the-connection-between-portlands-recent-crimes-and-possible-mental-illness/
Yeah, no thanks. The moment you lock away groups of people “for their own good” is the moment the majority of the voting public dehumanizes them and only ever perpetuates an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality in regards to policy.
There is a real storm coming across all of the world in regards to our collective mental health crisis and we’re doing a very good job of ignoring it or thinking that reactionary policy that historically has shown to be terrible on most accounts is the best way to confront it.
This is going to play out much the same way as our climate crisis unless we start truly examining, at a policy level, why our contemporary institutions are failing us collectively.
Again, that’s a reason to reform the process and make it work.
The alternative?
https://www.kgw.com/amp/article/news/crime/portland-psychiatric-facility-unity-center-behavioral-health-lawsuit-attack/283-81de7a64-3a80-4b3d-8968-53b10f9a1d95