‘Street-Clearing’ as Care

“Street-Clearing” as Care: When Psychiatry Becomes a Tool for Managing Visibility

Power’s asymmetry has no weather. It has one operator: it turns a visible conflict into a removable classification “for your own good.” Everything else is costume.

There is a policy motif that travels across parties, regimes, and decades. It is not “American,” and it is not “European” in any deep-cultural sense. It is portable because it is a governance technique: take what is publicly visible and politically inconvenient, translate it into a medical-administrative category, and then remove it from view under the banner of care.

In the United States, this motif has recently been stated with unusual clarity. In July 2025, an executive document compresses the entire program into a single sentence: shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings “for humane treatment” via the use of civil commitment is meant to “restore public order.” One sentence sets the telos, the pathway, and the costume. The telos is public order. The pathway is coercion. The costume is care. This is not accidental phrasing. It is the construction of an apparatus.

Public performances then lock the meaning in place: we “have to” bring back psychiatric institutions “to get people off the streets.” The institution becomes infrastructure for clearing visibility. The street becomes the scandal. The institution becomes the “fix.”

So who, exactly, gets “taken off the streets”? That question is older than the modern state, and the answer has been disturbingly stable. Across European history—at least since the late medieval and early modern periods—the same roster keeps returning under new labels: the homeless, the “mad,” the sexually nonconforming, women who do not fit the sanctioned scripts, migrants, strangers, the poor who refuse discipline, those whose mere visibility forces a cost. The names change, the legal vocabularies evolve, the moral costumes rotate, but the operator remains: a visible conflict is translated into a removable classification.

And where are they placed? That detail is almost always secondary, because the primary stake is not care but disappearance. The most revealing image here is the old European motif of the Ship of Fools: the gesture of pushing the unwanted outside the city, outside ordinary jurisdiction, outside the field of accountability. The point is not whether such ships sailed everywhere in a literal, uniform way. The point is that the figure names the function with surgical clarity: the “solution” is a spatial transfer that turns a politically binding presence into a managed absence. The street becomes clean. The apparatus can then call the cleaning “treatment,” and the public learns to experience removal as relief.

At this point many commentators rush into moral theater: compassion versus cruelty, freedom versus authoritarianism, “human rights” versus “law and order.” The language is easy and often effective, but it has a serious defect: it becomes decoration precisely when the threshold of acceptable coercion is being moved in real time. In the twenty-first century there is no automatic tribunal to which one can appeal “by definition,” and the domain of facts is itself a battlefield. If something is to carry ethical weight, it must begin elsewhere: with thresholds, decision trails, appeal paths, and explicit failure conditions.

The core issue is jurisdiction. Who decides which bodies may remain in public space, on what basis, by what evidentiary standard, with what possibility of correcting error? When coercive confinement is packaged as “humane treatment,” accountability is relocated. A political decision is redescribed as medical necessity. Then the public argument shifts from “Should the state do this?” to “Why are you against treatment?” This is not persuasion. It is threshold control.

Coercion in psychiatry is not an empty label. It is coercion with a vocabulary of care and a procedural form. That is exactly why the threshold is everything. If “visible disorder” becomes a sufficient trigger, the boundary between care and custody becomes administratively elastic. If success is measured as “cleaner streets,” the system will learn to optimize visibility rather than improvement. And if legal constraints are treated as obstacles rather than safeguards, the drift becomes structural.

Why should this matter to Israel, rather than remain a spectacle at a distance? Because Israel lives at high jurisdictional intensity. Words like “order” and “security” have enormous force here—and that also means a special vulnerability to language that turns removal from view into a public service. We have procedures for involuntary hospitalization, review mechanisms, committees. These can function as real care. But the motif I am naming does not depend on whether a system is formally legal. It depends on which telos begins to dominate.

If the telos becomes “restore public order,” psychiatry is recruited as a street-management device. If the telos becomes “get people off the streets,” the street itself becomes the diagnostic instrument. A person ceases to be a patient and becomes a visibility problem to be solved.

Here a second, equally practical thread appears: privatization drift. Coercion expands most easily when it is distributed across contractors and “service providers.” Profit and coercion should never share a single pipeline, because profit immediately introduces metrics of occupancy, throughput, and compliance as hidden goals. Israel has an institutional sensitivity here: the intuition that moving coercion into market logic fractures accountability. The same risk can emerge in psychiatry and care even if no one names it explicitly.

We do not need moralizing or grand labels to see what is happening. A simple observation is enough: when a society begins to experience forced removal as relief, it quickly begins to experience relief as virtue. And then the threshold moves “by itself,” without fanfare, under the banner of care.

This is not a story about one country. It is a story about a power-operator: how a visible conflict is translated into a removable classification “for your own good.” If we want to avoid a new form of quiet brutality, we have to guard the threshold—before “order” becomes a convenient word that replaces responsibility.

Genealogy without defeat-conditions is aesthetics. It can be brilliant, but it does not disturb the apparatus. Only a text that names the threshold and forces an audit ceases to be an academic form of recognition and becomes a tool.