I love Freddie DeBoer (he writes on Substack, for anyone who's interested). He suffers from bipolar disorder and knows the struggle of mental health from the inside, including hing spent time in institutions.
He's written extensively, and angrily about the "compassion" that says people who are obviously too fucked-up to care for themselves shouldn't be made to do anything they don't want to do. They can sleep on a snowy sidewalk in winter; they can shoot up in their necks because their arms and legs are necrotic, and then hunch over in a near-death zombie state; they can shuffle around barefoot in shit-caked clothes screaming in rage at anyone and anything. But it's "compassionate" to lee them to it, if they don't want to go to a shelter or to treatment.
My personal definition of "compassion" is: If this person was my son or daughter, my sister or father, what would I want to see happen to them? Would I want them to be able to refuse treatment, even if it meant dying literally on the street?
Freddie de Boer argues that, for so many "compassionate" progressives, the answer is yes. The will of a desperately sick, mentally impaired, trauma-scarred, drug-addled individual must never be violated, or it's not "compassionate."
And as for the working people who daily witness this drug use, stacks of dirty needles, fires, random piles of human shit, terrifying and often threatening behior? They are privileged, so they don't deserve "compassion."