Community Care,
Not Coercion

Educational resources, articles, and opportunities to contribute to a
growing resistance to involuntary commitment nationally

 
 

July 28, 2025

What is happening?

On July 24, 2025, the White House issued a sweeping executive order titled Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets. Framed as a public safety measure, the order outlines a federal agenda to expand coercive mental health practices and threaten already-fragile civil liberties for unhoused, mad, and disabled people.

It’s important to note that this order only applies only to federal funding and actions, and does not currently override state-level laws on civil commitment. Still, its intent is unmistakable: to revive an era of mass institutionalization, using the language of ‘care’ and ‘safety’ to justify confinement of marginalized communities.

What does the order seek to do?

  • Expand civil commitment by directing states to promote greater use of involuntary psychiatric holds and institutionalization – and attempting to roll back existing legal protections that limit forced interventions.

  • Criminalize poverty by incentivizing states to further crack down on enforcement of laws against squatting and loitering – tying funding access to carceral approaches.

  • Defund harm reduction and housing efforts by eliminating federal support for safe consumption sites and Housing First – despite evidence of their effectiveness.

  • Expand surveillance by empowering agencies to share health-related data on unhoused people with law enforcement.

Who is most impacted?

This order directly targets people already navigating the violence of criminalization, abandonment, and systemic neglect:

  • Threatens unhoused people with deeper criminalization  and institutionalization, with no real path to housing or safety.

  • Intends to further expand mass surveillance, the erosion of autonomy, and forced confinement of mad, disabled, and psychiatrically labeled people. 

  • Threatens to leave people who use drugs without access to initiatives that have begun to reverse the catastrophic trend of rising overdose deaths

Black, Indigenous, and other people of color are disproportionately impacted by these systems, as are queer and trans people.

What’s new about this?

The order reflects a familiar bipartisan agenda, advanced by both ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ administrations:

  • It echoes efforts that have been unfolding in states like New York and California for years, under Mayor Adams and Governor Newsom.

  • It mirrors a growing wave of anti-homeless legislation, much of it driven by far-right think tank the Cicero Institute.

  • It builds on the 2024 Grants Pass v. Oregon decision, which allows cities to criminalize public sleeping.

It also continues a long history of tracking, institutionalizing, and disappearing mad, disabled, and unhoused people – now supercharged by data-sharing, predictive policing, and public-private partnerships.

While many of these ideas aren’t new, the order still marks an alarming federal escalation and coordinated effort to normalize psychiatric incarceration as public health strategy. What stands out in particular:

  • It calls to reverse key legal protections (e.g. consent decrees and court rulings) that limit involuntary commitment.

  • It enables police access to the health data of unhoused people, expanding collaboration between public health, law enforcement, and immigration systems.

This moment has also sparked widespread backlash. Psychiatric survivors and mad liberation activists have fought for decades to have these issues taken seriously. Now, people are finally starting to pay attention.

Ideological underpinnings

This executive order is the product of several intersecting, long-standing ideologies that shape who is seen as worthy of care, and who is treated as a threat to be managed or extracted from.

  • Carceral sanism: Activist and scholar Liat Ben-Moshe describes carceral sanism as the entanglement of ableism and incarceration that results in a worldview framing madness and disability as problems to be neutralized, not experiences to be supported. The public has been primed to believe people with psychiatric labels are dangerous – even though research says otherwise. Between 1996-2018, support for forced institutionalization increased, even for people described as experiencing “daily troubles.”

  • Austerity politics: The legacy of welfare reform and Reaganomics teaches us that when budgets get tight, the state’s willingness to support marginalized people disappears. Instead of resourcing the conditions people need to survive, governments reach for coercion and force.

  • Extractive and organized abandonment: Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant define extractive abandonment as the process of constructing certain people as burdens on the economy, while creating industries that profit off their regulation. Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains organized abandonment as a strategy that sorts people into categories of disposability. Some are abandoned to die slowly, while others are captured in systems that generate profit.

  • Necropolitics: Historian and theorist Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as the state’s power to decide who is allowed to live and who is marked for death. Under this logic, policies may be framed as protective or compassionate – but in reality, they sacrifice certain lives to preserve the comfort, property, or perceived safety of others. We see this in:

    • COVID-19 responses that left disabled, poor, and racialized communities to die at disproportionately higher rates.

    • Increased funding for police, prisons, and ICE, while budgets for education, housing, and healthcare are slashed; and

    • Global genocides being funded by the United States, including in Palestine.

Lessons from history

The policies being pushed today are not new ideas. They are recycled strategies from the past that have already failed.

  • Deinstitutionalization (beginning in 1960s-70s): The federal government undertook a massive process of closing state hospitals in response to documented abuse, growing demands for civil rights, and perceived advances in psychopharmacology, But while those closures were meant to be paired with investment in community care, state funding was withheld or redirected – leaving many people without housing or access to voluntary services. The very narrative that deinstitutionalization “failed” has been weaponized ever since to justify the expansion of psychiatric incarceration.

  • CARE Court (2022-present): Since its proposal, California’s CARE Court has garnered ongoing criticism from disability advocates due to how it undermines self-determination, expands surveillance, and fails to address structural issues like housing access. Since rollout, it has proven ineffective: enrollment numbers remain low, implementation has been uneven, and there is little evidence of improved outcomes.

  • Involuntary removals in NYC (2022-present): Mayor Adams introduced a policy authorizing the involuntary removal of unhoused people from public spaces, framing it as a public safety measure. Preliminary data reveals that most removals have occurred from private residences, and the policy has been enforced with stark racial disparities.

The cycle is familiar. First, the state guts social services. Then it blames individuals for the fallout. And finally, it builds new carceral mechanisms to manage the chaos it created.

Groups like the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC) have played a central role in this pattern. For decades, TAC has pushed laws that erode civil liberties under the guise of ‘treatment,’ including outpatient commitment and forced hospitalization. TAC helped architect NY’s first involuntary outpatient commitment law, and their influence continues today in policies like NYC’s involuntary removals and CA’s CARE Court.

If we don’t break this pattern, we will continue to see policy after policy disappear, rather than support, those in crisis.

What the research says

Psychiatric survivors have long known that force is not care, and research confirms it:

  • Harmful outcomes: A 2025 study found people involuntarily hospitalized in “gray area” cases – where clinicians disagreed on whether a hold was necessary – were  more likely to die by suicide or overdose, face incarceration, lose housing or employment, and be further destabilized.

  • Racial disparities: A 2022 study showed Black, Asian, and multiracial people are disproportionately subjected to involuntary holds and court petitions.

  • No proven benefit: A 2025 GAO report found federal evaluations of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) were inconclusive, with no clear evidence of better outcomes than voluntary care.

How to fight back

For activists, organizers, and community members:

  • Get educated: This isn’t a new crisis, but the latest chapter in a long history of state abandonment and control. Learn the true history of deinstitutionalization, and sharpen your ability to recognize carceral approaches when they are disguised as ‘care.’

  • Get organized: Connect with grassroots collectives, and support (materially or in other ways) legal defense networks, housing and bail funds, and harm reduction coalitions.

  • Care collectively: Community care has been practiced for generations – often without institutional backing. Participate in and support your local mutual aid networks, peer support groups, and radical therapy groups.

For therapists and health care workers:

  • Understand the history of your field: Reckon with the violent lineages of your profession. Psychology, psychiatry, and social work have all served as tools of control.

  • Understand your power: Your decisions (e.g. to diagnose, recommend hospitalization, or label someone “gravely disabled”) can have life-altering consequences. These are not neutral clinical judgments, but socially embedded and deeply political.

  • Resist from inside the system: We need care workers to use their skills and access to disrupt the status quo. If you’ve taken an oath to “do no harm,” now is the time to live it – by standing with those your field has harmed.

Decarcerating Care:
Histories of Coercion and Dreams for Liberated Futures

In April 2023, we hosted a community discussion examining how institutionalization has long functioned as a tool of social control, and how that legacy continues today through the expansion of involuntary commitment directives across the U.S.

→ Watch the full recording on YouTube
→ Explore the other installments in the series

No More Carceral Mental Health Services:
Fighting Back Against the NYC Involuntary Commitment Directive

In late 2022, we participated in an Instagram Live hosted by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work pushing back against the NYC involuntary commitment directive.

→ Watch the full recording on Instagram

Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum

If you’re looking to deepen your understanding of how carceral logics shape mental health systems—and to explore what it means to build care outside of coercion—this is the place to start. Whether you’re a clinician, peer support worker, or activist, this curriculum can help ground you in the knowledge and skills needed to resist psychiatric violence and move toward liberatory care.

→ Enroll in the curriculum

Crossroads of Crisis: Self-Paced Course Series

This 8-part self-paced course series invites you to interrogate what crisis is, where it comes from, and how we might respond with curiosity and care. Drawing lessons from community-based efforts, the series supports you in disrupting paradigms of coercion, developing a personal code of ethics, and attuning more deeply to the needs of those you support.

→ Enroll at the general or supporter rate

 

Immediate Response to the Executive Order

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