"Where Are You Going To Put Them?" The Psychiatric Bed Crisis

Some elected officials want to enact laws to involuntarily commit people who are mentally ill and pose a public safety risk to themselves or others. But where would they go?

Every few weeks, it seems like an elected official determines that the best way to deal with people struggling with addiction or living on the streets because they can’t afford housing is to force them into treatment.

Involuntary commitment, court-order detention without consent, is in fashion with the powers-that-be, with the loudest among them being President Trump, who signed an executive order in July directing local governments to consider using federal funds to implement policies to make sure those with “serious mental illness” can be detained.

The only very small, surely utterly insignificant problem is the fact that there are simply too few beds at psychiatric hospitals available for mass re-institutionalization. Trump’s executive order acknowledges this, encouraging localities to consider using federal money to guarantee sufficient space to detain people against their will.

It is true that people who are suffering from severe mental illness have few places to go if they are una…