[Fatnino]

When I was in school there was this homeless guy that moved into a small storage room on the ground floor of the dorm, around the back somewhere. He's had the whole thing going on, matted hair and beard, dirty clothes, shoes falling apart, rot on his shins, piles and piles of crap in "his" storage room and he slept in the middle of it.

He was allowed to go on like this for years because his brother was very wealthy and was generous with the school administrators.

My last year there, the dorm was slated to be torn down and replaced with a much larger one. His brother had to come and take him away.

A few months later I saw him sitting on a bench and he looked like a completely different person. Clean shaven, put together. He told me the time he spent living in the storage closet was horrible and he wished his brother had forced him into treatment years earlier.

[notch656a]

The moral of the story is people should be forced to do things without their consent if they'll be healthier/better for it?

I find myself utterly incompatible in living in such a society and I've spent much of my life seeking other people and locations that eschew such violence

[Fatnino]

No, the moral of the story is that just like you wouldn't allow a 4 year old to choose his own bed time or to eat candy for dinner, you also shouldn't let someone with compromised mental faculties make decisions about living in storage rooms.

[notch656a]

The legal position of starting off as a free person and having that taken away is not at all analogous to one of someone who starts out as an unfree person (child) and has (or hasn't) reached self agency. Pretty disingenuous analogy, and even then we're ignoring the contextual differences typical present between mother/father/guardian and a government apparatus. This is seen time and time again, for example the burden for a parent to not have their kid removed is not at all the same as the burden to get your kid back from state custody. That is the decision making path (grant agency to non-free person vs don't remove agency to free person) is not symmetrical in either direction as you mistakenly suggest towards.

Also If we're going by someone with compromised mental faculties, I would say an organization (state of New York) who physically and/or sexually abuses the disabled* is not fit to make these decisions. The New York State government has proven themselves to have compromised mental faculties and thus unable to make these decisions to violently/forcibly institutionalize the portion of 'mentally ill' adults who don't aggress upon others. In part New York paired down their institutions because they were such terrible places for these people to be, often worse than in the gutter with teeth rotting.

IMO even the disabled, especially if they are not acting in a criminal capacity, should be asked for their consent before violently being forced into institutions of physical and sexual abuse for which New York is known.

*grep for my below comment about Willowbrook State School where we discover the (mentally disabled) children you worry so much about are actually abused by New York when institutionalized.

[sershe]

Why does the order matter in "has (or hasn't) reached self agency"? Brain is an organ - you seem to agree that child's brain is under-developed and may lack sufficient "self agency". Adult's can be destroyed in various degrees from 0 to irreversible coma. At some point you have to draw a line and say - "this brain is too underdeveloped/damaged, it doesn't have sufficient self agency".

You don't draw child's line at merely being to express their desires, why would you do so for an adult?

[notch656a]

I think New York State should also require the consent of children before institutionalizing them for non-criminal matters. The history of New York state suggests they are child abusers and mentally unfit to make decisions to forcibly institutionalize the non-criminal mentally ill.

If I were a child of sufficient age to express desires I would rather beg in the streets in a state of psychosis than be in the institutions such as New York's Willowbrook State School.

[sershe]

Children can express desires at 3, maybe earlier. At least single-noun desires, such as wanting all the candy, followed by a tantrum. Should there be some intervention, or should a 2-3 year old be allowed to have all the candy?

In any case, it's shifting the goalposts. Now we are talking about particular states depriving people from agency, in the previous comment you were talking about a mentally unwell person being categorically entitled to their agency...

I personally think it's a two way street, with 2 inflection points. If someone depends on welfare state in any significant degree, it should be valid to deprive them of a little bit of agency, since it's sorta indicative of them not being capable of good decisions. Kinda like teenagers in the child analogy. If someone depends on welfare state to a large degree and also STILL cannot keep it together in terms of committing crimes / being an active menace to others, it should be valid to deprive them of a lot of agency. Kinda like 3 year olds.

At any rate in context of the article, I think agency should be proportional to responsibility. NYC should just be tough on crime in this case, and any mental health defense should be conditional on losing agency. If you are mentally healthy enough to refuse to be committed, you are mentally healthy enough to be held responsible and go to jail.