Across America’s streets, the homeless epidemic is claiming lives, fracturing families, and eroding public safety. Often deeply intertwined with mental illness and addiction, it has become a humanitarian crisis that traps vulnerable individuals in cycles of dependence and despair while destabilizing the communities around them. This crisis has been worsened by policies that elevate the notion of “freedom” over timely, life-saving intervention.
Recent events make the consequences of that choice unmistakably clear. Continuing on the current path is neither humane nor responsible.
Consider what unfolded in New York City over the holidays. A woman with a documented history of serious mental illness and homelessness was released from psychiatric care, only to purchase a knife hours later, then repeatedly stab a mother changing her baby in a store’s restroom.
Thankfully, both mother and child survived. But we must be clear that this was not a random act of violence — it was a foreseeable failure of a system that confuses discharge with success and autonomy with safety.
In Honolulu, another homeless individual perished from advanced cancer that physicians later said was treatable with timely intervention. While untreated disease ultimately took his life, it also robbed society of the human potential that could have been restored had policy acknowledged his inability to make informed decisions about his own care.
The Reiner family tragedy has laid this failure bare. Two parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, were brutally murdered in their Los Angeles home by their adult son — a heartbreaking outcome in the context of his long struggles with addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. Their surviving children are left traumatized, and their family is irreparably shattered.
These are predictable results of public policy choices that ignore anosognosia — a neurological condition common in severe mental illness and addiction that strips individuals of insight into their own impairment.
When public policy relies on voluntary compliance alone, this version of “freedom” becomes a slow, preventable death sentence for those least capable of protecting themselves. The result is a system paralyzed by fear of intervention, even as untreated illness escalates into violence, loss, and irreversible harm.
For decades, civil commitment standards have been weakened in the name of civil liberties, requiring proof of imminent danger before action can be taken. By the time that threshold is met, irreversible damage has often already occurred.
Meanwhile, homelessness is at the highest point ever recorded in our nation’s history, as is the death rate amongst the homeless population, driven largely by addiction as this JAMA study from San Francisco indicates.
Voluntary programs help some, but they leave the sickest behind, precisely because many individuals are incapable of making rational decisions about their own care. Housing without treatment does not heal psychosis or addiction. It merely relocates suffering.
That is why the Trump Administration’s current push to strengthen civil commitment laws and expand their use represents an overdue and necessary course correction. Expanding the criteria for intervention, requiring treatment plans with accountability, and ensuring continuity of care are acts of moral responsibility.
Governments that turn to court-ordered treatment frameworks and supervised care models are beginning to confront a hard truth: When individuals are too ill to recognize their need for help, the humane response is intervention.
While the Homeless Industrial Complex insists involuntary treatment undermines civil liberties and that it does not work, it was the abandonment of treatment-first approaches — not their use — that coincided with an increase in homelessness, even as public spending ballooned, all under a promise to end homelessness in a decade.
It is a profound injustice to allow people with brain diseases to deteriorate, die, or endanger others in the name of an autonomy they do not meaningfully possess. Addiction and serious mental illness are diseases of the brain, not moral failings. Ignoring them does not preserve freedom; it destroys lives, fractures families, and imposes devastating consequences on communities and society as a whole.
Accountable compassion pairs empathy with responsibility. It invests in psychiatric beds, recovery-oriented addiction care, and the resilience of human beings. It recognizes that public safety and human purpose are inseparable values.
Untreated mental illness, including improperly treated mental illness, costs the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually through emergency care, incarceration, lost productivity, and community destabilization. America cannot afford more preventable deaths on sidewalks, more assaults in public spaces, or more families shattered by untreated disease.
Thankfully, this Administration recognizes that a society that refuses to intervene until blood is spilled is not a free society at all.
Michele Steeb is the founder of Free Up Foundation and author of “Answers Behind the RED DOOR: Battling the Homeless Epidemic,” based on her 13 years as CEO of Northern California’s largest program for homeless women and children. She is a Visiting Fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Fix Homelessness Initiative. Follow them on Twitter: @SteebMichele and @ DiscoveryCWP.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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