NC Stabbing Suspect Was Repeatedly Charged for Seeking Help

But for the New York Times, the ongoing failures of treatment providers somehow justifies more forced treatment

[Est. reading time: 8 mins]

The New York Times has in recent years been trying very hard to justify expanding civil commitment—to the point of making gross distortions of fact, even when their journalists and editors clearly know better. A prime example is the NYT article published online this Sunday, September 28th about Decarlos Brown Jr., the person charged with killing Iryna Zarutska on a subway train in North Carolina (NC).

The NYT announced its main arguments right in the article’s title and subtitle:

N.C. Stabbing Suspect Had Many Interactions With Police and Little Treatment

Decarlos Brown Jr. had harbored paranoid delusions for years, yet under state law he was not considered dangerous enough to be treated against his will.

There’s a lot that’s incorrect and offensive in this article, but I’ll focus on just these key overarching themes: The claims from NYT journalists Shaila Dewan and Eduardo Medina that Brown got little psychiatric treatment because involuntary commitment laws are too strict and rights-protective—along with the associated implication that forced inpatient treatment would’ve helped.

It’s not too difficult to refute these assertions — indeed, if you read it carefully, Dewan and Medina’s own article provides a large body of the evidence to contradict these assertions.

He refused treatment… or, he was refused treatment?

First of all, Brown certainly cannot be described as someone who was never seeking help and was constantly evading hospitals and psychiatrists. Indeed, for years, and right up until the murder, Brown was pleading for help.

At times, his family managed to cajole Brown to go to psychiatric hospitals. And other times, Brown himself wanted help so vehemently and so often that a number of the charges he faced in court over the years were—literally—for overusing 911 and seeking help too much. The NYT article itself variously recounts:

For years Mr. Brown had been telling hospitals, the police and even, he claimed, the F.B.I. that his body had been contaminated by a “man-made material,” enabling the government to control him. To his family, he complained that health care workers told him it was a matter for the police, while the police told him it was a medical issue. Often, these encounters ended with Mr. Brown in jail.

Beginning in March 2024, Mr. Brown had a run of six minor interactions with the Charlotte police, including for welfare checks and in response to repeated 911 calls he made.

Mr. Brown frequently visited hospitals to complain of the “material” in his body. On one such visit, in January, he was arrested for a third time on a charge of misusing 911.

Even after the murder, Brown reportedly expressed to his family hope that he might finally get the help he’d been seeking.

It’s common for people to present in emergency rooms complaining of undiagnosable ailments and then get shuttled into psychiatric wards. So if anything, one might be inclined to blame these many hospitals and psychiatrists for failing to develop any kind of relationship with Brown and intervene in any effective, truly helpful ways. However, it seems possible that Brown might have been a repeat-victim of a trend at hospitals of refusing help to, and calling police on patients whom they don’t like or feel they can’t help—ironically, these are often the more seriously troubled people whom psychiatric hospitals are most strongly mandated and funded to help.

But the NYT does not want to go there or discuss any of that—instead, the journalists blame civil commitment laws that allegedly didn’t allow any of those hospitals or psychiatrists to help Brown.

The laws are too strict… or not, depending on who you want to blame

Notably, Dewan and Medina take pains to show that U.S. President Donald Trump was wrong when he blamed the murder on “radical left judges” and “Democrat-run cities that set loose savage, bloodthirsty criminals.” The journalists present abundant evidence that most of Brown’s previous crimes were relatively minor or small-time armed robberies, and that he was prosecuted by both Democratic and Republican district attorneys “in a state where a Republican legislature has controlled the criminal statutes for 15 years.” Brown also spent six years in prison.

But Dewan and Medina do not take a similarly critical approach to Trump’s assertions that civil commitment must be expanded—instead, the journalists take great pains to reinforce Trump in that view, and sometimes twist truth to do it.

Prime example: Although they never present Brown in his own voice, the NYT journalists portray him as having been psychotic and violent for years—then, with implied lament and tragedy, they state that civil commitment laws are too strict to allow the commitment of even someone who is so obviously psychotic and violent.

But under state law, he [Brown] was not considered dangerous enough to be treated against his will.

In case you missed it, the journalists then state again:

a 50-year-old Supreme Court decision limits involuntary treatment, requiring courts to find that people are a danger to themselves or others.

And in case you missed it, the journalists then have a prominent pro-force lobbyist, unchallenged, say it yet again:

Stephen Eide, a policy analyst with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said the left’s concerns about civil liberties have set too high a bar for involuntary psychiatric commitment.

This same refrain continues throughout the NYT article: Over and over again, Brown had encounters with hospital psychiatrists who always wanted to help him, but strict civil commitment criteria got in their way.

However, later in the article, something strange happens. Namely, this paragraph:

North Carolina’s law says that people can be involuntarily committed if they are a danger to themselves or others, or if treatment would prevent deterioration into a dangerous state. [bold added]

Wait—what? Did we miss something? Did North Carolina’s civil commitment laws suddenly change part way through Brown’s story? Or did Brown suddenly cross state lines and into a different mental health law jurisdiction—a rare jurisdiction that dares to defy the iron rule of Supreme Court precedent?

No, neither. Instead, suddenly, late in the story, Dewan and Medina decided to describe North Carolina’s civil commitment laws accurately.

As I explored across hundreds of pages of Your Consent Is Not Required, there isn’t a state left in America with mental health laws that still truly abide by that old Supreme Court precedent. And in North Carolina specifically, under both the statutes and state-court precedents, the criteria for commitment have long been among the broadest and most flexible in the country—allowing a person to be involuntarily hospitalized and forcibly treated indefinitely, simply if doing so is believed to potentially help prevent the person from mentally or physically deteriorating in future.

So, it’s not the laws, but the journalists’ characterization of the laws that suddenly changed. And why?—Well, note the sentence immediately before the shift occurred, which I’ve bolded below:

It is not clear why the case manager or staff at the homeless shelter did not transition him into long-term treatment, given his evident distress. [bold added] North Carolina’s law says that people can be involuntarily committed if they are a danger to themselves or others, or if treatment would prevent deterioration into a dangerous state.

At this point in the story, the NYT journalists are blaming a community-based case manager and staff at a homeless shelter for screwing up. These stupid people, the journalists essentially argue, could’ve easily gotten the severely distressed Brown committed shortly before the murder under NC’s broad, flexible commitment laws, but did not do so.

Never mind that, in fact, neither shelter staff nor the case manager actually had the power to commit anyone—they could have petitioned, but a psychiatrist and judge would have still made the final decision. More importantly, at every other point prior to this part of the story, the NYT journalists were effectively excusing hospital psychiatrists for not treating Brown—those wise, caring doctors, they essentially argued, wanted to commit him but could not under NC’s overly strict, rights-protective commitment laws.

So, are NC’s civil commitment laws very strict or conversely very broad?—for the New York Times, that depends on whom you want to blame or excuse, and for what purpose.

This is not the kind of misrepresentation of law that two journalists and who knows how many NYT editors simply miss seeing—especially when the very same article, further down, corrects the misrepresentation. However, if the goal is to help push for more coercive inpatient psychiatric beds and more forced hospitalizations rather than for more voluntary community supports and services, then it makes perfect sense.

And Dewan and Medina do promote inpatient force repeatedly.

Coercion is helpful, and the criticisms are flimsy if you don’t listen to them

The NYT journalists write that too many ordinary mental health providers are “ill equipped” to manage people with schizophrenia, that forced treatment is “often limited to a brief period,” and that the number of inpatient psychiatric beds is “too low.” Dewan and Medina discuss no evidence for these particular assertions—the implication is simply that forcibly treating people for longer in well-equipped (whatever that means) inpatient beds will have some sort of miraculously positive impacts.

In fact, in cases of people labeled with “schizophrenia” like Brown, most often “treatment” in psychiatric hospitals is simply cocktails of antipsychotic tranquilizing drugs—drugs that exact a huge toll in often-severe adverse effects in exchange for improvements of, on average, 4 points on a 210-point symptom-measurement scale (an improvement so tiny that it arguably does not even rise to the level of being clinically significant).

Meanwhile, as I’ve written often, the psychiatric bed numbers have risen and mental health laws have broadened in much of America for decades, but this rising coercion seems to have backfired. This is a view reinforced in a recent study out of Pennsylvania that found involuntary commitment can increase homelessness, suicides, and serious violence.

Yet as far as criticisms of involuntary commitment go, Dewan and Medina’s article identifies only that some people suggest coercion may sometimes be “undermining trust in the mental health care system” and that “brief commitments are useless unless there is a plan to continue care.”

Those are calculated, sterilizing ways of characterizing criticisms of forced treatment—criticisms more often emphasize, for example, how the experience of coercive psychiatric interventions can be terrifying, brutal, deeply traumatizing, and potentially permanently damaging. Indeed, significantly, such profoundly critical views are expressed at length in a recent investigative report out of North Carolina itself—which found extremely high numbers of people being detained under mental health laws in the state (among the highest detention rates in the nation) along with dismal care, a severe lack of accountability, and widespread abuses at inpatient facilities.

So, would it really have helped Brown to have gotten more often pulled into such a system, and for longer?

Notably, it’s also not clear at this time how much or how often Brown was, in fact, taking psychiatric drugs: “Officials declined to say whether he was diagnosed or treated in prison, and his family was unsure,” the NYT article stated. It’s not implausible, then, that the strange and aggressive behaviors that the family said Brown suddenly inexplicably started engaging in shortly after his release from six years in prison were caused by, or dangerously exacerbated by antipsychotic drug-withdrawal symptoms.

In any case, ultimately, the NYT article’s core arguments make little sense—except as an example of twisting facts to make an argument in support of expanding civil commitment.

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A more thoughtful article could have delved into what Brown himself found helpful and how he could have been better supported by public community services instead of being thrown into homelessness and despair by family members who felt unable to help him anymore.

But too many governments and news media are uninterested in that. Last week, GOP legislators in North Carolina passed Iryna’s Law—exploiting the death to ram through an omnibus bill of draconian criminal law changes with little to no relationship to Brown’s situation, such as ending cashless bail and reinstating executions.