Taking money from the already incredibly underfunded public service doesn’t seem like a great solution, but sure if you really want your payday, go for it. It’ll measurably make things worse, but you do you! However, if you want to see how to “sue the shit out of the government” in a productive manner, look up the trueblood lawsuit in Washington State.
Look, I’ll confess I’m pretty drunk right now and I’m sure I’ll regret being hostile to you in the morning. But you sound like a very decent person who, and thank your lucky stars for this, has no idea what you’re talking about. Habeas Corpus is the right to file a type of legal petition, for one thing. It’s not suspended during this process, you can file one to the court in response to this, and the jurisdiction will rule on it. However, in every jurisdiction I am familiar with, that petition would be thrown out unless you had evidence of gross misuse of the process. That’s because the patients aren’t being denied any of their rights during proper execution.
(I just wanna be clear that I’m not breaking this down point-by-point because I’m trying to rebut you, I’m just trashed and can’t remember what I’m talking about without the quotes there to read. You ask some very reasonable questions, too, that are worth highlighting.)
Surely you’re either deemed incompetent and you are involuntarily committed until you’re not… or you have habeas corpus.
Again, Habeas Corpus doesn’t work like that. This is a situation where the detention is wholly proper. And the confusion here is that you are being held on essentially evidential suspicion of being a risk. We can’t just let suicidal people go if there’s more reason to believe they’re going to kill themselves than not, that’s not how anything works. And we can’t say “oh, seems like you’re fine nvm fam” if you recently met the criterion to qualify for involuntary commitment and just let you go. That’s equally irresponsible. It’s a shitty situation. Once you’re in the system, it’s a moral gridlock until someone actually qualified to deal with the problem can finally get to you.
Unfortunately, forensic mental health evaluations require a highly skilled and certified practitioner to carry them out, and it turns out that there are fucking few of those that stick around in shithole places like Mississippi. Hell, even in the nice states there’s barely more than a handful of people qualified to carry these reviews out. One commonly proposed solution is, of course, to lower the certification requirements so the cops themselves can do the evaluation. I’m sure we all think that’s a great idea. The other, better solution is to train more people to be able to do these evaluations. We’re working on that. There are dozens of new medical schools focusing on mental health that have been built in the past several years, but the effect they have will be slow. Shit sucks.
What’s to keep a hostile actor from maliciously putting a person in this track instead of properly charging them if they’re just trying to dump them in a hole for two weeks?
Decent question. There are evaluatory criterion that must be met before the medical practitioner / law enforcement officer / other duly authorized authority can place someone under an official involuntary mental health restriction. It’s a checklist, it’s not very ambiguous, and it’s quite hard to actually meet all the criteria if you’re not actually at risk. However, just like ‘swatting’, I’m sure this could be abused by a determined enough asshole. People suck. There’s measures in place to prevent it’s abuse, so it’s much more difficult than ‘swatting’ someone, but there you go.
Or whoever runs the medical institution in question not providing adequate service.
My initial reaction is to tell you to fuck off, but that’s just because I see this sentiment constantly and it’s deeply frustrating. They are providing adequate service within their means. In fact, every facility in the country is operating far above their theoretical maximum capacity. How the fuck are they supposed to do more than they are right now? It’s not some “oh lazy staff” situation or whatever, the capacity of these facilities is dictated in large part by the fire codes. Most facilities are building new ward capacity, but building large buildings takes a great deal of time. And while that’s going on, the staff at these facilities have to deal with being assaulted every single day. They still show up to do this work because it’s important. But yeah, go off about how the “service” is “inadequate”. Fucking hell. The existing medical facilities are unable to handle the incredible strain put on them. The fuck are they supposed to do? I’m seriously asking because fuck if I have a good answer to this.
yeah, this seems messed up.
No argument here, though I’d say that this is well beyond ‘messed up’. This system is a gigantic, flaming dumpster fire. Unfortunately it’s wildly misunderstood and 2/3 of the country are standing around actively pouring gasoline onto it in either a malicious attempt to destroy the whole dumpster or a well-meaning attempt to extinguish the flames that hinges on the flawed belief that because water extinguishes fire, and water is a liquid, clearly all liquids must extinguish fires.