This post was originally published on this site
She successfully challenged her involuntary commitment to Bellevue Hospital in 1987, setting a precedent for homeless people that remains relevant today.
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Joyce Brown’s New York minute lasted longer than most. A onetime secretary, Brown became homeless in 1986 and began camping on a heating grate on Second Avenue and 65th Street in Manhattan.
A year or so passed before she was picked up by city officials, involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital — where she was declared mentally ill — and forcibly given medication. Brown, who was better known as Billie Boggs, was the first homeless person to become the focus of Mayor Edward I. Koch’s newly expanded initiative to address the increasing visibility of homelessness and untreated mental illness on the streets.
But, as she would later say in interviews, the city chose “the wrong one.” Unlike the dozen or so other people who would face similar fates, she said she knew her rights, and she would begin exercising them the very next day.
What followed was a landmark lawsuit centered on mental health, civil liberties and the involuntary psychiatric treatment of homeless people. “I’m not insane,” Brown would say. “Just homeless.”
Before long, Brown was lofted from the pavement to prominence, with a whirlwind of interviews on talk and news programs.