I can tell you one worse. In many states your spouse has a mental breakdown OR a medication reaction the doctor labels as mental illness YOU the spouse have no legal say in the treatment. You can not sign you have no input unless you have a written medical POA. The attending doctors will call the state in and the state decides. This is first hand information not hearsay. My wife had an adverse reaction to antidepressants causing a Serotonin Migration to her brain with symptoms similar to LSD or acute psychosis.
I wanted blood work done and an MRI or CT of her brain. The doctors six to be exact said no. I had no say. I knew something other than mental illness was going on and I proved them right but it took nearly five days. I did what the doctors didn't do I looked up the meds for adverse reactions.
I used to work in a county contracted nursing home in the maintenance dept. The nursing home had about 50 persons from the enlightened exodus from a mental hospital they had been in. One we called Pain and Agony. Give him string and he would tie it around his private and try to hang it. These persons could not function in any environment and needed round the clock watching. Not locked up as such but watched.
I can say this much for certain. In the early 1970's when I was an early teen I could safely walk downtown at night. By 1976 it had changed. Persons were being put out on the street creating significant homeless issues that lead to crime like breaking into vehicles. About that same time my dad began to carry where he worked because he had to park under an interstate bridge and got off at midnight. Today Knoxville, Tennessee is a homeless Mecca known throughout the eastern states. You can look at the sheriffs arrest logs and many are homeless drunk and disorderliness. IOW self medicating with alcohol. It likely has the largest homeless shelter in the southeast. Lots of Administrative wages to be earned running a NPO shelter.
In this article the mans family requested he be checked on. Right now in most states that duty falls upon the LEO's. LEO's are not mental health professionals. A trained team of staff in a mental facility including Orderlies can usually subdue a patient if needed with minimal risk to all but they have Meds they can administer ASAP that work ASAP. Cops Don't. Then again I saw a 4'10" almost 80 year old woman where I used to work take on the entire floor staff of about six.
Sometimes it was funny. One woman on third floor had her own private paid phone. She called 911 and said there was people having a party in her room and a man outside her window dancing naked. The cops showed up because they have too and asked where the patient was. We said third floor and they laughed and told us what was going on. In the mean time she had barricaded herself in the room with the bed LOL.
I believe you are right about how that policy changed society around 1976. I was just a kid then, but I was around to see it all happen. Indeed, many of the homeless are people suffering from mental illness. Or sometimes a tragedy sends an otherwise mentally healthy person off the deep end, and that person checks out, just starts living on the street.
Still, I can understand both sides of the argument:
(1) the side that wants to ensure loved ones are given the best care, and
(2) the side that wants to ensure that people who are no danger to themselves or others are not institutionalized against their wishes.
In high school, one of the teens who was institutionalized briefly told of how an adult female patient at the mental hospital tried to assault him while he was there. He certainly wasn’t mentally ill. He probably was put there because his family thought he might be depressed or he was using drugs. There’s a fine line sometimes between what society deems sanity and what society deems insanity.
OTOH, if all you’re asking for is a CT scan or an MRI for a loved one who is suffering, that’s a different story. My family’s experience was different: Cancer had spread to my father’s liver, which threw him into a terrible mental state one day. By the time he reached the ER, the nurses had to strap him down because he was fighting them. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to be strapped down; it was obvious that something was wrong, and he needed help, whether he wanted the help or not at that point. (He did recover with no memory of what had happened, although he passed on a few weeks later.)
I agree that a few orderlies armed with the right medicine would be the better choice. Maybe these stories will prompt a return to that tactic.