Across the country, a troubling trend is accelerating: the return of institutionalization – rebranded, repackaged and framed as “modern mental health care”. From Governor Kathy Hochul’s push to expand involuntary commitment in New York to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal for “wellness farms” under his Make America Healthy Again (Maha) initiative, policymakers are reviving the logics of confinement under the guise of care.
These proposals may differ in form, but they share a common function: expanding the state’s power to surveil, detain and “treat” marginalized people deemed disruptive or deviant. Far from offering real support, they reflect a deep investment in carceral control – particularly over disabled, unhoused, racialized and LGBTQIA+ communities. Communities that have often seen how the framing of institutionalization as “treatment” obscures both its violent history and its ongoing legacy. In doing so, these policies erase community-based solutions, undermine autonomy, and reinforce the very systems of confinement they claim to move beyond.
Take Hochul’s proposal, which seeks to lower the threshold for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in New York. Under her plan, individuals could be detained not because they pose an imminent danger, but because they are deemed unable to meet their basic needs due to a perceived “mental illness”. This vague and subjective standard opens the door to sweeping state control over unhoused people, disabled peopleand others struggling to survive amid systemic neglect. Hochul also proposes expanding the authority to initiate forced treatment to a broader range of professionals – including psychiatric nurse practitioners – and would require practitioners to factor in a person’s history, in effect pathologizing prior distress as grounds for future detention.
This is not a fringe proposal. It builds on a growing wave of reinstitutionalization efforts nationwide. In 2022, New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, directed police and EMTs to forcibly hospitalize people deemed “mentally ill”, even without signs of imminent danger. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom’s Care courts compel people into court-ordered “treatment”.
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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The United States is witnessing the return of psychiatric imprisonment | Jordyn Jensen
(www.theguardian.com)
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Okay but the alternative is just doing what we're doing, which is worse. I know it sounds awful and it surely should not be the end point, but "facilities dedicated to addressing mental health issues" are such a step forward from the current system that it literally does not matter what happens at them. No, seriously, just the part where they would be SCREENING people would be an improvement. Just not chaining them to the wall would help (literally. No, literally, to the wall with chains). Hell, separating them from gen pop and putting them in a big pit is better than how we're handling it now, which is in some cases literally an unfinished concrete pit under the jail.
I fucking loathe RFK and this admin, and it kinda drives home how bad our mental healthcare is that even these evil sons of bitches, when they're trying to make it more vile and dystopian, are accidentally proposing huge positive reforms.
Problem is, this is a completely incompetent and insane government, so these new institutions will be underfunded, unregulated, and poorly run. The result will be inmates being starved, beaten, tortured, neglected, and killed by by staff. I don't think it will be any better than what we have now.