That bill is kind of long and hard to read because of all the legalistic language (I guess it’s to be expected that a proposed law would be that way). Anyway, I didn’t read enough to make any informed judgment about this particular bill, and I can see how psychiatric treatment could be the lesser of evils for someone whose likely alternative would be prison. But generally I think there’s a lot of truth in what Sally says about the “lack of jobs, lack of housing, and lack of safety and opportunity” as reasons why many people come to the attention of the mental health system.

For most practical purposes, there is no longer a national social safety net in this country for people who aren’t part of mainstream society. Our quarter-century-long war on the poor has pretty much shredded that to pieces (not that it was all that great even before the so-called “Reagan Revolution” – but I think it’s much worse now). How can a country that judges everyone almost entirely on how much money they have, and doesn’t protect it’s citizens’ most basic needs if they become poor, even pretend to care about their mental health?

In the town where I live, some teenaged thugs have recently been attacking homeless people while they sleep in public parks and open spaces. Over the Labor Day weekend, they assaulted one man in the park across the street from where I live so badly that he later died. A few others were merely injured – I wonder what it did to their mental health to be attacked that way? It just seems to me that the professed concerns for everyone’s mental health seem to ring kind of hollow when it’s such an accepted state of affairs that many people go without decent jobs, basic housing, any kind of meaningful opportunity, and can be kicked to death while they sleep by the children of the wealthy and the middle class.

Predictably, I don’t like the bill, but that’s because I don’t think untreated mental illness is the problem, I think it’s lack of jobs, lack of housing, and lack of safety and opporutunity in general. I don’t think forced medication will ever work and I also don’t think forced testing of people labeled as drug addicts to keep them off of drugs can ever work. Also, forcing meds on people based on unreliable diagnostic procedures and tenous at best research that these drugs help is stupid, immoral, and unconstitutional.

And if we’re going to force people labeled mentally ill to subject themselves to lab tests to determine if they are drinking or using illegal drugs, shouldn’t we test the entire population?