Involuntary commitment to psychiatric hospitals is common throughout the world and does not need to be horrific. There are plenty of ways to do it with safeguards and oversight.

It’s very heavily used in Japan, used at fairly high rates in places like Finland, Switzerland, etc. Its part of the reason those countries don’t feel as sketchy as the US when you visit. They don’t have mentally I’ll people just wandering the streets screaming weird shit, smearing poop on stuff, and acting erratic.

But here in the US, we decided that since we sucked at psychiatric commitment the past, we should never do it again.

The left convinced themselves this was the best thing to do to keep vulnerable people from being abused, and the right loved the idea of gutting free social / medical services.

And to this day, even in a era of hyper partisanship, it’s one of the few things where, when polled, the majority of the left, right, and center all say that involuntary psychiatric commitment is bad.

And every public and quasi-public space in nearly every big city suffers as a result.

But if we were to do it, I’d bet that people’s comfort using (and their support for) public stuff, like transit, would go up tremendously.

But as long as we let nut jobs roam free, there’s always going to be people who prefer to lock themselves in their own private steel box to travel around.