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Guy was clearly unstable and in over his head. Not against the law mind you, but his mental health was deteriorating (by his own mothers admission) and he began threatening FBI agents.

The 14 months in prison without due process could have been expanded on more in the article, there was next to no info regarding that situation which leaves the reader with a fair few unanswered questions.




What's there to say? Involuntary mental health commitment in the US is a disaster. The doctors operating state-run mental health prisons are overworked and underqualified. And, if you've had run-ins with the doctors operating private mental health hospitals, you know that's saying something!

Lopez was apparently armed and, from the picture painted in this article, pretty much unhinged. Something needed to be done. But the only "something" the criminal justice system has in its bag of things is, by pretty much all accounts everywhere, a total debacle.

Are things better in other countries? Who's doing this well? What does Norway do?


In The Netherlands I imagine it would go like this:

He would annoy the AIVD (or RIVD?), at some point possibly breaking a law (the threat). The AIVD isn't authorised to arrest I think, so they would make a complaint and a police officer would come to his door, interrogate him, recognise the mental health issues and send a note to his physician.

The physician would call the guy and try to get him into a voluntary institution or at least to see some kind of therapist on a weekly basis. Let's say the guy is unreceptive to his.

Next step is that a social worker in his neighbourhood (this is a new system called wijkteam) is assigned to him that will visit his residence once a week. The worker will knock on his door and try to connect and build trust, family and friends are encouraged to participate in this process.

If the guy screws up too bad though, and the police gets involved another time or two the physician will be asked to authorise an involuntary treatment and he would end up in an institution of which would be much like a rich state in the US (NY, CA) one I think.

Note that nowhere in this process there would be a solitary confinement or separation from his family. That might happen in the NL but I can't imagine it would ever happen for more than a few days.


NY and CA state-run mental hospitals are deeply unpleasant and staffed with overworked, underqualified doctors who have caseloads consisting of the very most difficult patients in numbers that would overwhelm private-practice doctors even if they were just teenagers with mild eating disorders. Is that the case in the Netherlands as well?

(For whatever it's worth: the NYT piece doesn't say Lopez was ever held in solitary, or that he was denied visitation by his family --- but solitary confinement is a distinctive US problem and a legit contrast to draw with the Netherlands).


A few years ago I would have confidently and naievely answered no to that question. Unfortunately recently a few scandals made it to the national news that Dutch mental institutions are not in the state we'd like to believe they are. As far as I understand the 'average' mental health patient is treated O.K., but there's not enough budget for the really hard cases where one patient basically requires full time supervision. One scandal was that instead of dealing with a patient like this, the staff had just put him in solitary confinement. Another scandal revealed cases of bullying and sexual abuse by staff. The sort you'd expect in a big organization with humans and awkward power relations, I can't say for sure if it's any better than those in the US.


> solitary confinement is a distinctive US problem

Not really, it's a problem in Europe too. We just don't talk about it.

If you get arrested here in Finland, you'll by default be in solitary and will remain so until the cops, not the courts, feel like letting you out.


Has anyone tried to challenge that sort of thing in the European Court of Human Rights?


Yes, and Finland for example has consistently lost. The problem is that in practice these court decisions only end up benefiting the individuals bringing the suits, as it's almost impossible for public workers to get fired here they can safely ignore those decisions in most cases.


If the FBI investigated, found he was mentally ill and armed, and then all they did was send a note to his doctor, and this guy ended up shooting someone, there would be public outrage at why he wasn't detained.


There's small outrages like that every now and then. I think it's better to have a system where every now and then a person is allowed to do something he's not supposed to, than a system where people should always be wary of communicating with their government in fear of being randomly detained for 14 months.


I'm not particularly mad he was arrested. It's the extended trial-less detention (helped by the withholding of evidence by the FBI) that scares me. There's no speedy trial in the US anymore, and pre-trial detention can last years.

Don't get arrested. Your life will be ruined top to bottom.

Side note: I don't feel like anyone cares about real justice anymore...


Long pre-trial detention is a huge problem in the state systems and one of the biggest human rights issues in the U.S. today. At the federal level, adherence to the Speedy Trial Act, which provides a 30-day deadline for indictment and a further 70 days to trial pretty good. Average pre-trial detention is about 4 months in the federal system.

The article states that Lopez was held in mental units in prisons--his long detention was probably the result of his mental situation.


There is next to no funding in the US for public mental health. We no longer have aslyums, because those were awful infringements on people's rights, regardless of whether or not they're sane. But we never replaced those centralized mental institutions with the community psych care that was necessary to make up for the gap. So now many of those same people live on the streets and/or in and out of jail and hospitals because of a lack of long-term support.


My wife works as a nurse in the Emergency Department of a hospital in Washington state, which has a shortage of mental health hospital beds available for patients. They are forced to board these patients in the Emergency Room for days at a time. The rooms often have no windows and are not set up for long term care. If the patient wasn't crazy before coming in, they will be by the time they leave.

The stories she has make my engineering job look like some kind of kindergrten. Patients trying to eat their own feces, trying to hurt staff members. Just remember techie folks that there is a whole other world out there where very bad and difficult things do happen.


And they're all exacerbated by the broken political machine the US has become. (Not that this is exclusive to the US.)

I will never understand how the right wing in this country has become so detached from helping people that actually need it. It's certainly un-Christian, but put that powder-keg aside for a second and it's bad for property values and businesses and communities and tourism and everything that creates more wealth when the least of us aren't cared for.


> “Any attempt to arrest me will be treated as a hostile act,” he wrote to Mr. Reising. By then, agents had been informed by the Delaware State Police that Mr. Lopez’s mother, Joyce Lopez, had told them that her son had a shotgun and was in a “poor mental state.”




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