alt Hacker NewsI mostly agree with your points, but I think the involuntary incarceration is a major rock and a hard place situation.
There are definitely people for whom it would be a compassionate (and often societally optimal) thing to do. Giving the government the power to decide to take people away indefinitely is just a spectacularly bad precedent. Especially right now.
Yes, you have to be very, very careful. Lots of abuse with involuntary commitment, that's part of why it was abolished so completely.
I mean the reason this is a pipe dream and we all just opt to deal with it is that our state/institutional capacity has been eroded so completely. So, we just take away the public benches and call it a day.
The cruel way to do this is to just criminalize the behavior and then move all these people into the prison system. I think that would be a moral sin, but I see why people go there -- the alternative would be to construct a totally new, parallel mental health system with kinda like a jury/parole board type system, representation, and so on, and make it explicitly not part of the criminal justice system. Since the point is rehabilitation, not justice. All that would probably be insanely expensive, but a society focused on the humanity of its citizens would probably see it as worthwhile. Our society unfortunately, just does not see its citizens that way.