On Monday, August 18th, the Washington Post editorial board went fascist. Or authoritarian. I’m not sure which. Some kind of -ist or -arian, I’m sure.
But in the context of homelessness they joined with President Trump and came out in favor of “involuntary commitment.”
They write that it “got a bad rap” and “the streets got more dangerous” because we abandoned the practice decades ago, and therefore it was time to — in the age of Trump no less — have a rethink.
They write:
In a July executive order, Trump called on his administration to “seek, in appropriate cases, the reversal of Federal or State judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that make involuntarily commitment too difficult.
The editorial begins this way:
President Donald Trump has been on a tear against homelessness. Not just as part of the takeover in D.C., but everywhere. He sees it as part of his broader fight against lawlessness. Key to that agenda: expanding the use of involuntary commitment for people experiencing severe mental illness.
They then recall the bad old days of in-patient psychiatric treatment. They were bad, and they should be remembered, and never repeated.
Happily, those facilities have long since closed and in their place is a whole new class of psychiatric drugs which did not exist then and a whole new batch of professionals and professional ethics which did not exist then.
In short, there are very real guardrails against the badness of the bad old days and very real help for people who could not otherwise be treated successfully.
“Involuntary commitment, a last-resort option, is an important tool to help those who cannot help themselves,” they write. “Last resort,” it seems to me should be the operative phrase.
The Board goes on to note that “civil commitment laws differ across the 50 states,” and that “Supreme Court precedent requires ‘clear and convincing’ proof that a person is a danger to themselves or others.” The Board then recommends — amazingly — that we learn from the states, from our fifty laboratories, to see what works. How very federalist of them!
They conclude:
One reason so many mental institutions closed a generation ago is because they cost states so much to maintain that states judged it would be cheaper to tolerate more people living on the streets. Whether someone is committed to an inpatient psychiatric facility today often depends not on their need but on whether capacity exists for their care. The Treatment Advocacy Center has estimated that the United States has about 60,000 psychiatric beds available. That’s about 40,000 short of what is probably necessary to meet the minimum needs of the country. It is essential that, if people are going to be involuntarily committed, there be places for them to go.
Forty thousand extra beds sounds dramatically short of needs, considering that last year there were at least 771,000 people across America who experienced homelessness for at least one night last year. And even that number sounds small, considering that nearly half the total number are in New York. One estimate says that in New York City alone almost 350,000 “were without homes in June 2025” which is “the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”
To put that in perspective, one of America's largest cities, Austin, Texas, has a population of a bit more than 388,000.
Not all of these people will need a psychiatric bed, and not all the beds will be occupied long term, but let’s consider New York City as a metric for need; one can quite reasonably assume that at least 10% of the homeless there are on the street because of psychiatric issues. That’s 35,000 beds needed simply to accommodate the mentally ill of just this one American city. So you see the 40,000 more beds nationwide number the Post calls for is woefully inadequate.
Caution is warranted. While we know Trump’s Executive Order is applicable only to those indigent in genuine need, we must be careful to see to it that these new practices don’t transmogrify and they remain in use only for the indigent in genuine need; we don’t want to see “MAGA” to be deemed a mental illness under a different president then have Uncle Fred ripped out of his recliner and hauled off to a facility. We can grimly chuckle at the word picture, but we’ve all seen how frighteningly easy it is for them to involuntarily confine people “for their own good” or confine people they simply don’t like: see COVID and Jan. 6.
In any event, clearly more must be done to not just clean up the streets, but clean up those on the streets of their very real mental health crises.
MAGA worries aside, it’s good to see a major paper’s editorial board nodding in that direction. It’s simply not compassionate to let them suffer so cruelly both mentally and physically. It’s inhumane.
Image: Rehab Center Parus, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed
