The issue is that when you carve out exceptions to human rights, they get abused.
If you can suspend the rights of someone declared mentally ill, the unscrupulous parts of government will be tempted to declare politically inconvenient people mentally ill and strip them of their rights. Even in the United States, this happened during the suffragette movement; those women hunger striking for the vote were sometimes imprisoned in asylums for hysteria.
> The issue is that when you carve out exceptions to human rights, they get abused.
Even something as simple as detaining a criminal is "carving out an exception to human rights". You're correct that this could be abused, but so can any law. It's possible to mitigate though; that's the entire reason for the concept of an independent judiciary.
I don't think detaining a criminal is the counter-example you want to be using here. If anything, the horrific and egregious ways that the incarcerated are treated is proof that the government is incapable of not further harming people who they deprive of human rights.
The point is that you cannot categorically say that human rights should not be suspended for any reason. The fact that a particular implementation happens to be unpleasant and at times unfair does not 1) suggest that human rights should never be suspended or 2) suggest that the alternative would not be at least as unpleasant.
Few people would suggest that not having prisons is a better alternative than having them, however unpleasant. Similarly, in a world of deinstitutionalization it seems unlikely that 500k people living on the streets is the best of all possible worlds.
I'm merely pointing out that the criminal system is an extremely poor example that the government won't further abuse people once it takes their civil liberties.
If anything its an example that suggesting to bring back asylums should be considered synonymous to an advocacy where the abuse of detained people is taken into account as an acceptable cost.
But mind you: The last time we implemented detaining people, this was in border control, and resulted in the border patrol trafficking children through abusing the child separation policies at the time. There are still tens of thousands of missing children from this policy, implemented for a scant few years.
Safeguards can be put into place, and these days it's easier to shine light on things (and get information about abuses out to the world) than it was in the past, but I agree that there will be abuse.
I think we have to accept that, unfortunately. Our current situation is untenable, and there really just does not seem to be any way to "fix" someone on the streets with a mental illness without committing them to a mental institution. If you do believe there is another way that will be broadly applicable and successful, please suggest alternatives.
I'll agree that we also need significant structural changes to society (which will lessen the number of people who end up in these bad situations in general), but those changes will take years (if not decades), and the bleeding needs to be stopped in the meantime.
In general the root cause situation is the same; the housing is too expensive, there are not enough mental health professionals or drug treatment professionals in general due to the cost of schooling vs the compensation. It’s the same in and out of prison, and calling it an ‘asylum’ doesn’t really change the fact that when those were around people were not getting better anyways.
We suspend human rights in various circumstances all the time. Society couldn't function without bounded human rights suspensions. It just has to happen under specific conditions (due process, independent judiciary, checks and balances, etc.)
IMO we do the same for crime. And maybe that should be the standard? Many of the mentally ill homeless repeatedly commit minor and major crimes throughout their existence in that state, and they essentially become prison type 2?
Why not fix prison type 1 first so that it can accommodate the existing prisoners with mental health issues? Our current prisons are horrible for people with mental health problems. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit there that could be addressed to improve standards of mental care -- and it's not like people with mental health issues aren't ever sent to prison when they commit crimes. The State already has a pretty large collection of people with mental health issues who are forcibly incarcerated, and it's not helping them.
Obviously a problematic/crass analogy, but think of it like getting a hamster before you get a dog. Prove that you can take care of prison 1, and then maybe we can talk about you getting prison 2. But if you can't take care of prison 1, you probably aren't going to be very responsible about prison 2.
And I just don't know if you're ready for prison 2 yet, prison 1 still has a lot of human rights violations in it. Prison 1 doesn't really make feel like we all know how to avoid committing human rights violations against people with mental health issues, it really makes me feel the opposite.
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I don't know, I genuinely don't mean to be snarky about it, just... it's a little weird and uncomfortable to be sitting in the realm of theories while discussing a system that actually exists in the real world and that horribly hurts people on the regular, and to say, "we'll just expand that and have the same standards." People with mental health issues already get incarcerated and they're treated horribly, and we're glossing over that when we talk about incarcerating more people.
Yes, there will be some abuse. But the question should be will we still reduce suffering overall? Fighting your own mind is insufferable. It is not humane to let people wander the streets locked in an eternal battle with themselves. I vote yes, bring back involuntary inpatient therapies, but with strict safeguards.
> Yes, there will be some abuse. But the question should be will we still reduce suffering overall?
This is basically the argument of the pro-gun-control folk. The counter-argument I keep hearing is that rights are sacrosanct, any concomitant negatives are the price of liberty.
If you can suspend the rights of someone declared mentally ill, the unscrupulous parts of government will be tempted to declare politically inconvenient people mentally ill and strip them of their rights. Even in the United States, this happened during the suffragette movement; those women hunger striking for the vote were sometimes imprisoned in asylums for hysteria.