What We Don't Know Can Hurt: Ignorance Creation and Involuntary Commitment Data Initiatives

In "Minding the Gap: The Absence of Pennsylvania's Involuntary Commitment Data," Gluckman et al. draw on agnotology and undone science to argue that unreported information about psychiatric commitments results in the disenfranchisement of vulnerable populations and call for better data on those affected by involuntary commitment. Their analysis assesses ignorance as an object, focusing on the qualities of granularity, scale, and intentionality to describe the negative space around absent data. We present a complementary agnotological framework centered on the passive and active processes through which ignorance is generated and maintained. We examine four elements that passively produce ignorance: conceptual frameworks, which determine whether committed persons are constructed as patients, public safety risks, adjudicated individuals, or stakeholders; community, whose exclusion yields epistemic injustice and weaker science; methodologies, including the non-neutral construction of data dashboards; and incentives, which shape what is profitable to know. We then discuss active agnotological forces, both harmful and virtuous, and how they influence what is knowable. We address privacy, an intentionally constructed ignorance whose protective purpose is contested in the context of involuntary commitment. We conclude by arguing that understanding how ignorance is created is critical in designing data initiatives that improve outcomes rather than perpetuating existing harms.