The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill Into Treatment

A man, clearly homeless, steps onto a New York subway train. He shakes, sways, and talks to himself, lurching around as the train moves, in the throes of a psychotic disorder. He’s someone in need of help — and for many people, though they’d never admit it publicly, a figure to fear.

The perspective of the American media and the liberal journalists and writers who dominate it is that these fears are wicked, bigoted, even “bourgeois.” Efforts to explore root causes related to mental illness and violence in public spaces are resisted with the insistence that those problems are entirely a product of poverty and need. Attempts to use involuntary treatment to help severely treatment-resistant people with mental illness are decried by the activist class and local nonprofits. The pursuit of safety on the subways in response to fear of random violence, we’re told, “means hiding, quelling, or even outright eliminating certain marginalized populations — Black people, homeless people, mentally ill people, poor people,” as Noah Berlatsky put it. A reporter from the Times of London sniffed, “Almost all the people I meet who are scared of taking the subway are people who don’t use it regularly.” There is an elite message when it comes to danger on the subway: It’s embarrassing to ever be scared.