“History teaches us to beware of benefactors who deprive their beneficiaries of liberty.… There is neither justification nor need for involuntary psychiatric interventions.” —Professor Thomas Szasz
The problem they chose to use was rising homelessness in America. In the Sixties, the “solution” they came up with was to simply round them up, whether they like it or not, for “treatment” (read “powerful brain-numbing drugs”).
But why stop with the homeless? Surely, there are many others out there who should be off the streets “for their own good” and lovingly nurtured by those who know better what’s best for them.
And so, Judgment Day comes early for many of society’s innocents.
Each year, more people are locked away in psychiatric wards against their will than in state and federal prisons.
They’re not being judged as sinners or saints, nor by an impartial jury from above.
Instead, they’re judged on the basis of “sanity”—with the judges being those who profit most from a thumbs-down verdict: psychiatrists.
This “trial”—for that’s what it truly is—offers no jury, no defense attorney, no due process. It takes only minutes and hides behind the euphemism “involuntary psychiatric evaluation.” The word “involuntary” is particularly cynical in its use, implying something that couldn’t be controlled but was bound to happen—like a burp or a sneeze.
Take a community like New York City. Last year, nearly 7,800 of its citizens were taken against their will for psychiatric evaluation. Most were not homeless, although that was the “problem” supposedly being addressed.
A July 2025 Federal Reserve Bank of New York report analyzed 16,630 involuntary psychiatric evaluations in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, between 2014 and 2023. It found that 78 percent of these evaluations resulted in the next euphemism: “involuntary hospitalization” (read “coerced incarceration in violation of the victim’s human rights and the 14th Amendment requirement of due process”).
Each year, more people are locked away in psychiatric wards against their will than in state and federal prisons.
Since 2011, involuntary hospitalization rates have grown three times faster than the US population.
And today, an estimated 1.2 million people are detained against their will—often drugged and restrained—every 12 months. That’s more than double the mortality rate from cancer.
With numbers like these, you’d expect results—at least if “care” were the goal. So let’s crack open the ledger and see what passes for “results” in the psychiatric industry.
The July 2025 Federal Reserve Bank report found that those involuntarily hospitalized for psychiatric reasons were nearly twice as likely to die by suicide or overdose within three months of release. Earlier research paints an even darker picture: A 2014 study of 50,000 cases found psychiatric hospitalization raised suicide risk by 44 times, while a 2017 study put the figure at 100 times greater than average immediately after psychiatric discharge.
Harvard Public Health tracked 22 individuals after their involuntary hospitalization. All relapsed within a year. Two died.
Pim Welle, co-author of the July report, has stated that the findings establish conclusively a link between involuntary hospitalization and harm—be it suicide, overdose or violence—after discharge.
And as for that “homelessness problem”—the original pretext for mass psychiatric roundups—Jan Eastgate, president of mental health watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights, states: “Involuntary psychiatric commitment of the homeless is not a compassionate solution—it’s a costly, coercive and dangerous policy built on a system that has failed for decades. It compounds trauma, violates civil rights and channels billions into an industry that cannot cure, only control.”
In fact, homelessness went up with the growth of so-called “street psychiatry”—by 80,000 from 2015 to 2023.
“Forced treatment in psychiatry is a crime against humanity.”
These statistics are appalling. We find them appalling. You find them appalling. Anyone with a teaspoon of common sense finds them appalling.
Why don’t psychiatrists see what we see?
Because their noses are in a different ledger—one labeled “Profits.”
Involuntary psychiatric hospitalization puts up to $1.1 million per person annually into psychiatric coffers.
A single emergency room visit for a homeless individual adjudicated “mentally ill” can cost $6,000. And with some returning to the ER hundreds of times in a year, that’s easily over $1 million per person.
Then there’s insurance: In 2019, Medicaid spent $6.2 billion on antipsychotic drugs, with the cost rising 16.7 percent between 2016 and 2021.
And the vicious circle continues even after patients are discharged. Under Assisted Outpatient Treatment laws authorized by most states, victims of involuntary commitment can be forcibly kept on drugs after their “stay”—until the cows come home. And if they protest, it’s a court order and back to involuntary hospitalization for them.
There are solutions to homelessness. They’ve always been there. None of them involve coercion and force. None of them profit psychiatry.
And they differ from the psychiatric model in two other fundamental ways:
- They don’t cost the sun, moon and stars.
- They are humane.
The psychiatric coercion-for-big-bucks model tramples on human rights, makes a mockery of the 14th Amendment and utterly ignores the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, which protects individuals from mistreatment in publicly operated facilities.
And where the law is flouted, corruption is inevitable and justice steps in:
- A Pennsylvania man falsely imprisoned for 7 days was awarded $1.1 million.
- Acadia Healthcare paid $19.85 million for Medicare/Medicaid fraud—locking victims up, drugging them and falsifying records.
- Universal Health Services kept patients longer than needed to drain their insurance. They were forced to settle for $117 million.
Danish medical researcher Dr. Peter Gøtzsche said it all: “Forced treatment in psychiatry is a crime against humanity.”
Bottom line: The 14th Amendment has not been suspended for “special cases.”
Homelessness is not a mental illness.
And there’s no place in America for gulags-for-profit.
Coercion is not care.
