There are a lot of people who care about animals in factory farms, a lot of grant money and many organizations. Prison reform is similar. Both causes are clearly part of the modern left coalition.
There aren’t similarly powerful organizations that care about the rights of patients in psychiatric hospitals.
In the particular case of factory farming, there’s a costly-but-simple solution: stop doing it. The animals’ lives are not worth having, so we stop creating them. For some subset of patients in mental hospitals, who can’t create good lives for themselves on their own and a further subset of whom are dangerous to others, it’s really not clear what we should be doing. Just letting people go created a bunch of negative externalities and it’s questionable whether the patients themselves were better off. Really amazingly good care, when we know how to do it, which is not always, is excruciatingly expensive. So even if someone cares about this issue a lot, it’s really not obvious what they should do or ask for.
EDIT: I finished rereading the SSC post I linked to and apparently there just is a better thing, outpatient commitment, and we should get right on that.
There are a lot of people who care about animals in factory farms, a lot of grant money and many organizations. Prison reform is similar. Both causes are clearly part of the modern left coalition.
There aren’t similarly powerful organizations that care about the rights of patients in psychiatric hospitals.
In the particular case of factory farming, there’s a costly-but-simple solution: stop doing it. The animals’ lives are not worth having, so we stop creating them. For some subset of patients in mental hospitals, who can’t create good lives for themselves on their own and a further subset of whom are dangerous to others, it’s really not clear what we should be doing. Just letting people go created a bunch of negative externalities and it’s questionable whether the patients themselves were better off. Really amazingly good care, when we know how to do it, which is not always, is excruciatingly expensive. So even if someone cares about this issue a lot, it’s really not obvious what they should do or ask for.
EDIT: I finished rereading the SSC post I linked to and apparently there just is a better thing, outpatient commitment, and we should get right on that.