There’s a move underway — across political lines — to send the mentally ill, homeless people somewhere else. Essentially, it seems to be a movement towards re-institutionalizing people we would rather not see walking around aimlessly.
In some communities like Los Angeles, the emphasis seems to be on the rising number of homeless people. In New York, there’s a tendency for officialdom to equate public mental illness cases with crimes on the street or in the subways.
Donald Trump has made it plain that if he can see homeless people around Washington, he believes the city is reflecting some kind of third-world values rather than seeing increased homelessness as a more logical outcome of economic and social policies that favor property owners and upward mobility.
In short, we’re seeing more proposals to move the homeless away from where they can be seen as if parking them somewhere will put the problems out of mind.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is pushing a proposal for “wellness farms” under his Make America Healthy Again (Maha) initiative to gather the homeless. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul promotes expanding involuntary commitment, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has directed police and emergency responders to hospitalize people deemed “mentally ill”, even without signs of imminent danger. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Care courts compel people into court-ordered “treatment” while in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass is building new apartments but losing a public relations war on spreading homelessness.
Justice Department officials are brainstorming ways to clear homeless encampments and increase the involuntary hospitalization of people with mental illnesses across the nation, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The Trump administration is committed to aggressive steps to clear homeless people from public spaces, apparently thinking that more law enforcement is the right answer to social issues.
Trump issued an executive order last month to make Washington “safe and beautiful” that included a directive for the National Park Service to remove all homeless encampments from federal land in the nation’s capital.
‘Psychiatric Imprisonment’
As Jordyn Jensen, executive director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, argued in a recent op-ed in The Guardian, we’re witnessing a “new era of psychiatric control being marketed as a moral imperative.”
The op-ed basically argues that under the rubric of humanitarian help for the suffering, we are turning increasingly in court orders, civic policies and now federal pressures to coercive methods of locking up the homeless or mentally ill. Columnist Jensen says that decades of research — probably now all on the spending cuts lists — show that involuntary psychiatric interventions often lead to trauma, mistrust, and poorer health outcomes, including suicides and flight from mental health care.
While policies address visible homelessness, they may “divert attention from the actual drivers of distress: poverty, housing instability, criminalization, systemic racism and a broken healthcare system.” What officials see as meeting citizen demands to do something about homelessness, she sees as psychiatric imprisonment under the guise of compassion.
Clearly no one knows how many are homeless in America, but city-by-city counts towards providing services pegs the total as several hundred thousand. Definitions obviously are hard to come by since addictions and untreated mental illness are factors beyond poverty and lack of affordable housing alternatives. Add in the decisions over the last couple of decades to forgo institutionalizing mental patients when they might do better through adaptation to living in society and you get a social stew that eludes the kind of easy answers promised by broad overstatements.
So what we are starting to see now is an expansion of state powers to surveil, detain and “treat” those deemed disruptive or somehow deviant. Since addictions skew racially, there are racial aspects that are part of this unhoused equation as well. With the arrival of lots of migrants, there is more competition for shelter space when it is available.
And there remains a certain bias that institutionalization was ended prematurely.
Danger or Blight?
In New York, the Hochul proposal could see individuals detained because they present an imminent danger to the community, but rather because they are deemed unable to meet their basic needs resulting from perceived “mental illness,” a vague, subjective standard. Hochul proposes expanding the authority to initiate forced treatment to a broader range of professionals to consider personal histories. New York City and California now have similar rules on the books.
In reality, much of what is reported as “crime” in my Harlem neighborhood revolves around the aimless behavior of a relatively known set of characters who are addicts or mentally ill. Police don’t know what to do and have tried adding social workers to some calls.
Even while reading about these approaches, news arrived that the new federal budget from Donald Trump proposes to eliminate money to deliver Narcan to addicts and generally to lean on local law enforcement to locate and deport migrants. These are the same migrants whom Trump insists are bringing fentanyl and heroin into the country.
The Trump administration has made major cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and its homelessness efforts, with advocates warning that the cuts could worsen the number of people living on the streets in the country.
It could be that we need more psychiatric institution beds — or a different set of social services that target and coordinate care, reduce personal harm, and seek to treat people with dignity. But if the construction of prisons did not eliminate crime, why do we think that building tent cities on the edge of town just to rid more traveled areas of homeless will reduce mental illness?
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