At a Democratic debate in June 2021, then New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang faced considerable backlash for his answer to a question about how he would respond to the surge of people with significant mental health challenges living on city streets. These individuals, Yang suggested, were “changing the character of our neighborhoods,” and should be swept off the streets and into psychiatric treatment against their will, for the good of society.
“Yes, mentally ill people have rights,” said Yang. “But you know who else have rights? We do! The people and families of the city.”
Yang’s opponents were quick to condemn his rhetoric following the debate—Eric Adams, who would go on to win the election, accused him of trying to “demonize” people living with mental illness. But Adams and Yang weren’t at odds on the substance of the issue. As mayor, Adams made forcing more unhoused people into mental health and addiction treatment a core initiative of his administration. In May 2023, ten days after an unhoused man named Jordan Neely was strangled to death on the subway while in a volatile state of crisis, Adams responded by advocating for forced care, noting in a press conference that people who suffer from mental illness “are at times unaware of their own need for care.”
In the past two decades, as the rates of homelessness have climbed to historic highs alongside spiking rates of severe mental health issues and substance use disorders, elected officials across all levels of government—including Democrats—have embraced a return to more aggressive and visible forms of institutionalization and punitive policies. Proponents of this approach often frame it as a compassionate response to the human tragedy of sick and incompetent people who cannot understand or articulate their needs. The root causes of their circumstances are treated as problems of the individual, rather than social and material outcomes. Yet at the same time, the agency and self-knowledge of each individual are erased.
When I watched Andrew Yang in the mayoral debate five years ago, I had to wonder: Do I belong to the “we” he spoke of, or the implied “them”? I am a trauma survivor who spent periods of my teens and early twenties confined against my will in psychiatric hospitals, where I and other vulnerable young people were subjected to further abuse and coercion. My inner world is at times one of harrowing extremes and altered states. And still I am here, living a full and productive life—one that has been made possible not by denying my autonomy, but by reclaiming it through community and the struggle for a just future.
This is why we have dedicated this issue of The Progressive to stories that center the agency and resilience of those who have been punished and stigmatized for struggling in a country that refuses them the basic necessities of life. We’re proud to feature the stories of ten individuals who have experienced homelessness in Los Angeles’s Skid Row through a series of photos and interviews by Amelia Rayno. Reporting from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Joseph Mogul follows community organizers whose mutual aid work with unhoused communities was impacted this winter when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) waged a full-scale siege on the city. Maia McDonald writes about outreach workers in Chicago, Illinois, who form connections with unhoused people sheltering on public trains. Robert Davis reports on a chilling proposal by the state of Utah to build a massive “accountability center” for unhoused individuals, while Rachel Litchman connects this story to her own experience of involuntary institutionalization in a first-person column. Ben McCarthy argues that the left now has a unique opportunity to reframe mental health challenges as social and economic policy concerns rather than primarily medical ones, and I illustrate what a community-led recovery approach looks like in practice in my profile of Fountain House, a group of “clubhouses” for people living with mental illness.
I often still think of Andrew Yang’s words; I think too of Jordan Neely, and of all those whose lives have been cut short by the cruel, calculated forces of a state and society that dehumanizes those hurt most by its abandonment. In Yang’s distinction between “us” and “them,” I know which side I’m on. And I find great solace in our ability, in spite of all that is stacked against us, to speak for ourselves.