New York City Mayor Eric Adams orders police and other city workers to move homeless persons into “psychiatric crisis” into mental hospitals, even if they’re not a risk to others, and they don’t want to go. Adams has connected the rise in subway crime to mentally ill homeless folks. Given the nation’s history of de-institutionalization, is this move by a Democratic mayor likely to succeed?
Scott Ott, Bill Whittle, and Stephen Green have co-hosted multiple episodes of a current events show each week since 2009 thanks to our Members and donors. To join and unlock access to exclusive features of our site, tap the big green button above. To donate with PayPal or bank card, tap the big blue button above.
11 replies on “NYC Mayor Orders Mentally Ill Homeless to Institutions, Against Their Will If Needed”
Lol, is Scott trying to get a job for a non V-neck t-shirt.
While I do applaud this move, I ask who makes the decision that the person is mentally unstable.
I recall back in the 70s some great people of knowledge and wisdom(sarc) decided that we need to close insane asylums and allow these people to be able to make decisions to not take medication and choose to be insane and creating havoc on the populations.
Always a thorny issue … judgement is key. But the jettisoning of institutionalization I think can be linked even to the rise in mass shootings.
On the other hand, back in the day, my grandfather divorced my grandmother and had her institutionalized — it was probably far too easy to do that. She got out later … my aunt “sprung” her … and she did fine.
So … it all boils down to the breakdown of our culture, and the (rightful) increasing distrust of our social institutions.
Yes … everybody’s a little messed up. The best we can do is structure society such that people are less likely to make the poor decisions that cause people to spiral downward into this state. There are SOME people who are so impaired maybe from birth that this can’t be stopped, and it can never be completely eliminated in others, but it can be suppressed.
We have jettisoned many of the social institutions (the biggest biggie is the rejection of the idea of God, let alone a relatively consistent narrative around Him across society) … it is no wonder we’re swimming in crazy.
I have bite scars from a client that was prone to violent out bursts. I don’t see him much but he is still a friend. Very bad brain injury.
Four things solved this problem in the past. One complicates it.
1. Most of these people lived in boarding houses and residential hotels not institutions. In the 1980’s these were largely banned.
2. Getting a pharmaceutical script and filling it, particularly for painkillers and psych meds has become more and more complex. This is either expensive or means you must queue for hours or days to see a doctor to get the ‘script’ for the med & then scripts are easily lost or stolen. biometric scripts solve this.
3. Church run institutions were defunded in the 1960 and again in the 1990’s. Leaving only the state run institutions whose atheist ethos resulted in failure.
4. A significant part is PTSD and in the US there is a problem. Private veterans associations are organized per unit, individually they are too small to help veterans. Veterans affaires is not good enough with the institutional atheism problem. You need a bigger peak body to do the work. Australia has such a big body the Returned Services League, it has had some problems, but its is better at supporting PTSD veterans than some US organizations. RSL clubs often serve as care facilities with poker machines. The noise actually helps some with PTSD!!!
The complication is that in many states and countries great efforts are made to get insane people what they want. That includes attending university psychology classes. We now have many fully qualified psychologists who are themselves insane. And they are the ones certifying sane conservatives as insane.
This is a complete aside, but knowing how today’s Democrats think, how long until this is used to declare Republicans as mentally ill and needing to be institutionalized?
That is not an aside its a key part of the problem internationally.
Scott is a saint !
There are things American society does poorly. Many have roots in the breakdown of the family. Some are purposefully exacerbated by government intervention. And those two things are frequently inter-related. Homelessness can be a consequence of addiction, physical and mental health with all of the financial burdens associated, being bad at free-market capitalism, and loss of family and community. All of these are not easy to fix. You cannot create community and give people purpose in life, the two most essential things for recovery, by throwing money at them. Institutionalizing them has to have a goal of community and personal purpose afterwards.
My sense of hopelessness regarding this topic improved after seeing a video on PragerU about homelessness, especially around the 20:00 mark when discussing “Community First!”, a privately funded area just outside of Austin, Texas.
Your profession makes you more qualified to speak on this topic than I am and I not only defer to your position but agree with you. You chose a profession that directly serves the personal needs of other human beings and that’s sort of the opposite of the kind of work I’ve been involved in all my life. Even after an injury sidelined me from living a very active lifestyle my ‘fallback’ career in IT is mostly a matter of working with machines and people are ‘peripheral’ ancillaries to the work I do. Peripherals which often cause me a good deal of frustration and consternation.
I say this because I want to accent the differences in the way we see things. Other than family and close friends, for me people are most often a problem to be solved and not so much the target of individual compassion. That’s just not how I was built. I’m not mean or cruel needlessly but I’m not very empathetic either. Being aware of this I try to compensate to varying degrees of success.
I don’t have clinical experience or statistical data to back up what I’m about to say. This is purely anecdotal.
I have a cousin who lives in the Los Angeles greater metro area. She was the only member of my generation born in California. We both raised two boys. I don’t know if the wildly differing results of our parenting were due to social pressures she experienced as a ‘Californian’ or a flaw in her personality (we all have them, I just pointed out one of mine) or something else or a combination of all of the above.
My cousin is an avowed ‘compassionate’ Liberal who has no idea at all that ‘Liberal’ means “controlled by the Left”. It’s not possible to enlighten her and God knows I and her father have tried.
Her life has been one long disaster.
She raised her boys under the philosophy that she should be their “best friend” in the whole world. She smoked pot with them when they were teenagers (she’s smoked marijuana all her life as far as I’m aware), let them win arguments she should not have which permitted them to ‘convince’ her to let them do things harmful to them, etc. I’m sure we all know the type but she took it to extremes because she was afraid of losing her “best friend” status with her kids.
Her youngest son literally and knowingly drank himself to death and died last year. She was hospitalized with a stroke when he died. Her oldest son stripped his gears on inhalants which were his fallback high when he had no money to buy drugs. That son has been in and out of institutions for mental issues most of his adult life and has been a financially supported by welfare and disability payments and resources for the last 20 years.
I lived down the street about a mile from them for 15 years and I saw all of this coming and I made every effort to intervene. This was heartbreaking not only to me but to everyone else in the family … Except her mother (my aunt) who constantly made excuses for her and her kids.
Since knowing her eldest son very well I have noticed the symptoms of brain damage due to inhalants many times in people I’ve run into on the street. Most of these were homeless people.
The eldest son is fortunate because that part of my family was quite wealthy right up until my uncle (my cousin’s father) passed away. After which they pretty much blew the money he had left them.
The inhalant victim grew up in a home where he was loved and every possible advantage was available to him. He chose getting high over those resources. If he had money he bought pot and alcohol, if he didn’t he used inhalants cheaply obtained in the local hardware store.
This has been a tragedy all around for everyone involved.
The way I see it, this has all been due to poor parenting, the breakdown of the family. The siren song of the Left wormed its way into that part of my family and destroyed them. I will never forgive the Left for this.
Contrast that to my two sons. One is an electrician married to his highschool sweetheart (whom I love dearly and think the world of) and the other just retired this year as a Commander in the USN who also married his high school sweetheart (whom I also love dearly and think the world of). Both raised good, Conservative minded Christian families and have given me a total of eight well adjusted grandchildren.
In both families, mine and my cousins, there was never any lack of love. My kids didn’t have access to anywhere near the material resources hers did yet managed to build good lives that I’m proud of as many might have noticed due to me bragging about then every chance I get.
Hers destroyed themselves.
Much of the reason for the difference is how each family defined ‘love’. I did what I thought was best for my kids, they were raised in a strict disciplinary environment with compassion and understanding. This was not a tyranny with me as chief tyrant, it was a family as I understood best what a family should be like. Indeed, I was often away on work related issues so this family model had to be one that both I and their mother agreed on or it wouldn’t have worked out nearly as well. For my family ‘love’ meant doing what is best for our kids even when it hurt.
I didn’t want to be their ‘best friend’ and found that idea not only abominable but a poor substitute for being ‘Dad’. A position I hold to be far, far more satisfying, rewarding and gratifying than ‘best friend’.
My son’s mother felt the same way, that being ‘Mom’ was a status far better and more impactful than being ‘friend’.
My cousin loved her kids too, but she was focused on being their ‘best friend’ which meant she was focused on her own feelings not what was good for her kids. I hated when I had to discipline my kids. They didn’t realize it at the time but it really did hurt me worse than it hurt them. I did what I saw as needful and my duty as Dad even so. The good times were amazing and the bad times when I had to get on one of my kids passed quickly with no lasting damage but instead a lesson well taught and learned.
My cousin solved the issue of feeling pain in disciplining her kids by avoiding it altogether.
In both families there was love, but it was applied differently and it was a different kind of love. In one family the children thrived and are now passing those values they learned while young onto the next generation.
In the other family the children were destroyed and there will be no next generation.
To my thinking, my cousin’s family was a microcosm of Leftist ideology and its inevitable results. Conversely my family was a microcosm of Conservative ideology and its inevitable rewards.
I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of those homeless mentally impaired people, whether it’s organic or due to addiction, where raised in families like my cousin’s.
Which compounds the tragedy because their lot was avoidable if someone had just cared about them in the right way.
I wish the world worked so black and white, ACTS. If we raised our kids with rules and structure and loved them in a way they knew was unconditional, all problems would be solved and there would be no addicts, mental illness, etc. It would be the absolute best thing to ever strive for, but you and everyone else knows this to be untrue.
I’m sure you know families that did everything right and had a child die from drugs. I’m sure you know families that lost their home from unexpected and unaffordable medical bills. The same for the unfortunate couple whose breadwinner passes away with the other being ill-equipped to function without them. Given just a little less support, Hershel Walker, a personal hero of mine, would have been in an institution for his dissociative disorder. I haven’t heard the results of the election yet, but he would make a fine Senator now that he is rehabbed.
“Homelessness, the reality and the solution”, a short documentary on PragerU gives a capsule discussion, shows who some of these people are, and could alter your perspective. I had issues regarding the hopelessness of the problem that benefitted from the viewing.
BTW, always look forward to your input, despite the length of your posts.