Solving the very broad issue of unhoused people is not likely to be a single one size fits all solution unless we want to simply incarcerate people for the crime of having nowhere to go.
Oh FFS, for like the fifteenth time spread across multiple threads:
1) Fund residential mental health facilities for those with severe mental health disorders, particularly those presenting with hallucination and/or delusion. These are people that are unable to care for themselves, unable to hold down a job. They need care in a place that keeps them safe as well as safeguarding the rest of society from them.
2) Involuntary rehab for drug abusers who are unable or unwilling to maintain a job while abstaining from substance abuse and undergoing effective outpatient therapy. I don't lump all drugs together, but the reality is that meth heads and a substantial number of opioid/opiate users cannot stop on their own.
3) Subsidized safe housing for those who do not have severe mental health or substance abuse disorders. I think it might be reasonable to provide separate housing for single adults than for families with children. This should include education and job training and a program to get them employed and into their own housing, not be a permanent dumping ground where nothing else is done except shelter. The objective should be independence.
4) Substantial investment in young childhood education, and an emphasis throughout primary and secondary school on the skills and knowledge needed to be an independent contributor to society.
I have given this same run down multiple times in multiple threads, and I'm sick to fucking death of people with an axe to grind and a complete lack of integrity repeatedly turning around and pretending like none of it exists and then proceeding to pull bullshit out of their asses and pretend like I want to throw everyone in jail or see them die. It's malicious, it's evil, and it's dishonest.
And you believe that the Republican party supports these policies?
Nor do I think much of
your solutions, even on their own merits. What exactly is "involuntary rehab"? Do you point a gun at someone and force them to say the twelve steps, or what? How can a rehabilitation process possibly be involuntary? Rehab is less than fully effective when the sufferer is trying their best to cooperate.
It used to be the case (and maybe still is) that you could have someone involuntarily committed for drug detox and/or for serious mental health crisis. 72 hr. hold. My inlaws tried that in desperation with my BIL who had serious substance abuse issues. It did not work.
I understand that there are circumstances where it can work: say someone with serious bipolar disorder or schizophrenia feels better on their meds, to the extent that they believe they don't need the meds anymore, so they go off, lose their equilibrium and need hospitalization in order to stabilize again. This is me, making up the circumstance under which involuntary commitment might be worthwhile. I do know absolutely that it is an issue for some people with some psychiatric illnesses going off their meds, believing they are cured or feeling that the side effects are causing them more problems than the disease.
This is more an issue of consenting to therapy and change in a momentary circumstance, consenting to the change itself, and then breaking the condition which created the consented outcome, though. It's not "involuntary" so much, it's just a treatment that places people in a fragile equilibrium most often.
I'm not sure I accept the excuse of forcing someone to medicate or be some way simply because you think your opinion on the acceptability of consequences is more significant than the person who has to actually do the accepting of those consequences of the treatment.
If there are alternatives to treatment, alternatives that do not involve a clearly unethical situation (such as throwing an insufferable and extreme vandal back out into a place where they can wantonly commit acts of vandalism) being created, such as denying them physical access to vandalize things, the "treatment" ought be deferred even if it means they will never get better and will keep being someone that needs to be kept away from potential victims.
If I was tomorrow omnipotent of this world, I would make a sandbox place where people such as this who wanted to exit to simply could, and where it would not affect those who stayed, and they could just live there, respawning as they may, unhurt by any consequence as they live their lives.
But I can't, so I will work towards the next best thing: a world where we can at least move towards something similar.
Solving the very broad issue of unhoused people is not likely to be a single one size fits all solution unless we want to simply incarcerate people for the crime of having nowhere to go.
Oh FFS, for like the fifteenth time spread across multiple threads:
1) Fund residential mental health facilities for those with severe mental health disorders, particularly those presenting with hallucination and/or delusion. These are people that are unable to care for themselves, unable to hold down a job. They need care in a place that keeps them safe as well as safeguarding the rest of society from them.
2) Involuntary rehab for drug abusers who are unable or unwilling to maintain a job while abstaining from substance abuse and undergoing effective outpatient therapy. I don't lump all drugs together, but the reality is that meth heads and a substantial number of opioid/opiate users cannot stop on their own.
And neither of these work.
Involuntary mental health treatment is useless. Involuntary rehab is useless.
I do agree with trying to help those that are homeless for economic reasons, but those aren't the ones causing the problems.
I didn't suggest just mental health treatment. Some degree of treatment is appropriate, certainly. But I specifically said residential facilities - literally places that house the severely mentally disordered so that both they and everyone else is safe. That doesn't assume some kind of magical cure. But it does keep those poor individuals from becoming victims... and it also keeps everyone else safe from the occasional psychotic break.
This would be great. It'll costs tens of billions of dollars, maybe even a hundred billion dollars, but it'd be great. We also don't have a shot in fuck of enacting such a program. GOP state governments are too busy criminalizing being homeless, rather than trying to tackle the ridiculously complicated issues of homelessness, addiction, and generalized human imperfections. The bigger problem is we lack the infrastructure (housing, medical facilities, and staffing) to run such a program. There are probably at least 100 million Americans that'd scoff at the idea of some people getting perpetual room and board at no cost. Especially when we can just criminalize it and pretend that does something.
Americans are too busy under-cutting each other to care about people in a plight they don't think they'll ever see themselves in. 40 years of Reaganomics has fucked our nation's soul.
So while I applaud your idea, I'm curious if you have any idea that has a shot in heck of actually occurring.
Hey now, at least it's an idea! It's more than we had before now from that camp, and yeah, I would say shut up and take my tax money for that, EXCEPT for the fact that this includes people who are perfectly happy living as they do and are capable of doing so without otherwise breaking laws.
It runs roughshod over the rights people have to live their lives free of such imposition.
I doubt, after all, that Emily would approve of a program to take "every person who acts entitled to take the freedom of others for the improvement of their own aesthetic pleasure" to a facility to free us all of their noxious effects in public life, despite this being a much more fitting target than "homeless people" for such treatment, and if it is not an ethical way to resolve MY aesthetic goals of streets free of horrible and unsavory persons, it is no more an ethical way to resolve her own!
