Blue City Blues: Getting Real on Involuntary Commitment

Fredrik deBoer knows a thing or two about mental illness. He’s been admitted into psychiatric hospitals five times; he was involuntarily committed in 2002. In other words, he has that holiest of latter-day-progressive holies – “lived experience.”

He has also written extensively, with clarity and passion and urgency, about why the idea of involuntary commitment of the severely mentally ill has long been a third rail in progressive blue city politics, and why that needs to change (he’s currently in the midst of writing a book on the topic). So we asked Freddie to join us on the most recent episode of our Blue City Blues podcast to make his case for reforming our laws and procedures, and even more so our attitudes, about how to address the problem of the mentally ill suffering on blue city streets. And to discuss why the disability rights community has gotten this issue so wrong.

In case you aren’t familiar with Freddie deBoer, it’s worth noting here that he has emerged in recent years as one of the country’s most original and fiercely independent commentators on American cultural trends more broadly. New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul dubbed him “one of the sharpest and funniest writers on the internet.” A self-described Marxist with a “reputation as something of an asshole” (that’s his own description of himself, btw), Freddie is a cogent critic of recent ideological turns within blue city progressive culture. His prolific, pointed and fearless writing, on a wide array of topics, has won him an enviably large following on Substack.

If you read any of his work, you’ll immediately understand why. One example: if you haven’t come across his lovingly crafted 2022 opus of inspired contempt, “The Good White Man Roster,” subtitled “a database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit,” we order you to immediately stop whatever you’re doing and head over to Substack to read it and weep (with laughter).

All of which is to say that Freddie deBoer does not pull his punches; his biting sarcasm has very pointy teeth. He does not suffer fools, so much as he eviscerates them. The uncompromising, searingly insightful truth value of his writing often hits you with the force of a hand grenade blast. “DeBoer is not a theorist. He is a romantic,” a New York Times book reviewer wrote of his 2023 book, “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.” That volume plowed some of the same ground (though using a very different approach) that sociologist Musa al-Gharbi did in his recent book, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,” which was the topic of Blue City Blues’ previous episode.

But with Freddie we wanted to talk about the mentally ill, and why cities like Seattle seem so unwilling to intervene in the lives of those too impaired to make rational judgements about their own well-being. And why, too often, the educated, affluent, supposedly enlightened denizens of blue urban America can’t seem to admit – or even to see – the harm these people are causing to themselves and sometimes to others.

“Most people have a mental block against really understanding the depths of deep mental illness because the reality is so unpleasant… that your will can be completely hijacked by a disease is so difficult for people to contemplate,” he told us. 

Freddie wrote the following last year, in the wake of the Jordan Neely tragedy on the New York City subway, in a typically incisive New York mag piece titled “The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill into Treatment”: “Fear of violence on the subway is in fact rational, even as we must rise above that fear to embrace compassion. The gloating insistence from progressives that they are never bothered by the behavior of disturbed people on the subway does not fit the facts about mental illness and violence. And if we truly care for those with severe mental illness, we must be willing to understand just how deep their problems go and what must be done to help them and those around them.”  

Or as he told us during our conversation, “Don’t let the sort of liberal parody of tolerance keep you from saying, ‘I don’t want to be trapped in a metal tube underground with somebody who was muttering to himself and punching into his fist in that sort of way.’” He added, “if the left does not have a vision for how to solve these problems, then the people will elect strong men who will come in and do it in a worse way.”  

If you’re interested in the topic of involuntary commitment, we can assure you that Freddie deBoer in person is just as good – and as immediate and as compelling – as he is on the written page. You can decide for yourself by listening to the episode yourself.

Blue City Blues Episode 5, “Freddie DeBoer: Blue City Progressives Need to Get Real on Involuntary Commitment” can be accessed here.