Portland
Welcome to the lemmy.world community for Portland, Oregon!
This community has kind of been empty since it was created, I'm hoping to change that!
Unlike "other" Portland communities you may have seen "elsewhere", I believe in a "warts and all" approach. You are free to take off your Rose tinted glasses and talk about topics that are dragging our city down.
At the same time, sunset pics, snowmageddon, traffic monster, cones, that's all welcome as well. Let's collectively keep Portland weird!
2024 is going to be an interesting year politically with all the changes to city government, I will attempt to tag political threads with a [Politics] tag and encourage users to do so as well.
Other than the lemmy.world restrictions on spam, copyrighted material, and adult material (USE that NSFW tag!), there's only one real way to get in trouble here:
- Don't attack other users.
It's OK to go after Teargas Ted, it's OK to say Rene Gonzales is a fascist, ACAB, BLM, whatever floats your boat (WEFYB).
It's NOT OK to attack or diminish another user. Feel free to disagree, you can point out the many ways you think they're wrong, just don't start throwing perjoratives AT OTHER USERS.
Links to know!
Portland Trailblazers Schedule!
https://www.nba.com/blazers/schedule
Portland Winterhawks Home Game Schedule!
https://www.rosequarter.com/events/winterhawks
Portland Timbers Pre-Season Starts in February!
https://www.timbers.com/schedule/matches#competition=all&date=2024-02-10
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You don't understand how long-term psychiatric care works.
You don't "cure" schizophrenia, buddy. Most patients are mostly stable.
I know people with mental illness who sometimes stop taking their meds and start fucking about and being manic, and once they get to be too disruptive, someone calls the cops, the cops go check it out (ours don't murder the mentally ill — which is a massive difference between our countries — ours are bastards still, but less murdery ones), and take him to the ER from which people who can't be helped right away because they're psychotic due to drugs go to a closed ward and people who are psychotic for non-substance reasons go another closed ward.
Usually though, with cases such as I know, it's quite enough for the cops to take the person to the ER where they give a slow-release IM injection of some antipsychotics, and the people won't be as bothersome for a week or two (there definitely are side effects to these meds, context really matters), but they will be able to go home and won't need to be taken into a ward — because outpatient care is a lot cheaper than inpatient care.
Stable being "no longer collecting garbage and seeing faces on the walls".
In the case cited above, the guy had housing but was still in a mental health crisis. Housing First cannot and will not provide that stability, only professional mental health care can do that.
And why do you think them not being homeless somehow excludes the option of mental health care?
It doesn't here. Where we actually use this policy.
Because right now, Housing First doesn't demand treatment. That's why it doesn't work.
It doesn't even demand you fill prescribed medication and take it on schedule, hell, it doesn't even require you get evaluated for prescribed medication.
So you get stories like the above, a housed undiagnosed mental patient filling their home with garbage and living in terror from things that aren't there.
You'll get those no matter what, until you manage to cure ALL undiagnosed mental illness. And undiagnosed mental illness is by definition undiagnosed.
Without "housing first" (again, a bullshit name) you'd have those people living on the street. You may not understand this, clearly living a sheltered life and having little to no actual experience on the matter, but homeless crazy people are a lot more dangerous than crazy people who get to go crazy in an apartment.
Oh no, did an undiagnosed mental illness result in an apartment that will take two men at least an hour and a half to fix? Oh no, that's acceptable, clearly we should not house people at all and toss everyone on the street to get even sicker and literally die.
"Housing first" is preventative. Living on the street creates mental illness, and a person NOT being homeless does NOT prevent them from getting mental health care. The main point of my last comment, nay, all my comments. Yet you can't answer it.
The fix for this is super simple, you get people healthy BEFORE getting them into housing.
You collect up all the homeless people and evaluate them.
Folks with mental illness are diverted to treatment.
Folks with addiction issues are diverted to treatment.
Folks with outstanding warrants are sent to corrections.
NOW...
Once people successfully complete treatment or have served their prison time, there needs to be a re-integration system, this applies also to homeless people who aren't part of 2-4.
There needs to be specialists here specifically to help people with criminal records.
As in step 5, there needs to be housing specialists just for people with criminal records.
If you put housing first, with no requirements for mental health or addiction services, it fails. Over and over and over again, it fails.
We have housing first in Finland and literally no-one lives on the streets. In tve US, they create new mental illness every day because they have to live on the streets which are covered in human shit.
You do not understand psychiatry or social policies and you shouldn't pretend to. You're some sort of sheltered liberalist who doesn't get heard in real life so you have to do... this.
I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire.
....
Wait... just saying things doesn't make them true? Huh. Well that's a surprise for both of us, isn't it?
Seeing how we literally don't have anyone living on the street in my country. What country are you from and why do you keep avoiding my question of why do you think NOT being homeless prevents people from getting mental health care?
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-international-philanthropic-071123.html
Finland also has universal health care which the United States does not have. You guarantee people will get the mental and physical health treatment they need, the US refuses to do that.
And again, refusing to answer how you think not being homeless prevents people from mental health care.
If you can't pay for housing, you can't pay for health care, mental or otherwise and in the US, that's the barrier to entry.
The US not having social security doesn't mean housing first is a bad policy.
No, concentrating untreated psychotics and addicts into a single location makes it bad policy.
What does that even mean?
Again. We use that policy. You don't. I have experience. You don't. None of you're bullshit makes sense. Mine does.
Housing first gives people housing without requiring them to enter mental health or addiction treatment.
You don't solve problems that way, you concentrate and amplify them. See all the stories throughout this thread on the continual failure of housing first.
TREATMENT first, then housing.
"Let's wait until we've cured all mental illness to give housing to everyone."
Yeah see the part in my first comment about how it's "hard to talk to some Americans"? This is exactly what I mean. This is like talking to someone from a theocracy advocating to kill all the gays. There's no commonality, there's no way for me to reason to you, there's nothing in the real world you'd respond to.
You just hold an opinion, and spam and spam and spam, like another pigheaded religious person.
Housing does not prevent treatment. Those aren't either or things. Prioritising housing doesn't mean "we'll get them an apartment before getting them any help for their mental illness" as I've explained in tedious length several times, it means that the policy understands that the foundation of mental health is physical safety that comes from having a place to sleep that's not the street.
This really isn't hard.
Imagine how annoying it would be for you to try to talk to a 18th century slaveowner about how it's not actually good for society to have slavery. Imagine just how annoying it would be to try to calmly talk the some slavers out of their "but they're sub-human, they love working, I'm just helping them, I'm actually the good guy here". Just imagine that for a bit.
And then realise that's the exact conversation we're having, and you're on the wrong side of it.
No, let's make sure people who need treatment get it before they fill their home with garbage and end up howling at faces on the wall that aren't there.
If someone is homeless because they are mentally ill and/or addicted, just housing them does not solve that problem.
You're making asinine assumptions that are counterproductive.
With your assumptions, you'll bar mentally ill people from housing, making their illness worse. Providing housing will further stabilise their situation, and only a tiny margin will fuck up their house to the point of it being actually negative in terms of societal cost. It takes A LOT to fuck up an apartment that bad. I know, as I know social workers who work with substance abusers, therapists, and janitors of people who live in buildings like that.
Yeah, see, again we go back to the "I can't talk to you" bit because you have assumptions like these, which read to me like "we should kill all the gays" or "blacks are subhuman" or "there's only two genders" rhetoric.
I genuinely don't know how to address the assumptions you hold, because they're so fucking archaic. I live in a country that has the policy you say doesn't work. We have less mental illness per capita than you.
And you've proposed NOTHING. The ONLY thing you've said is "don't give crazy people support."
It's not an assumption to say someone who is mentally ill or has substance abuse issues WILL NOT get better on their own. They need help to do it and they are no longer competent to make that decision on their own.
Shuffling them off to "Housing First" makes them sicker, not healthier. They need treatment first, not housing, if you want a permanent solution to the problem.
Otherwise what you end up with is what we see repeated over and over... an endless spiral of declining health and homelessness.
What I'm saying, repeatedly, is break the cycle. Get them the treatment they need FIRST, then, and only then, get them into housing.
If they can't ever be treated? House them permanently in institutions where they can't continue harming themselves or others.
But the real question is why are you so dead set against getting these people the help that they need?
Do you think there's no professional managing the case? That they just give them keys, a pat on the back, and proclaim "Figure it out!" It's naive to think either solution is a magic bullet, but one approach has statistically better outcomes.
That's EXACTLY the problem with Housing First. Legally they are prevented from placing restrictions on the housing.
So they can't demand residents enter treatment, remain sober, take their meds or even obtain proper meds.
It's housing without restrictions and that plainly does not work if the people you are housing have severe mental illness and addiction issues.
You seem to not know what Housing First is. From the 2007 HUD report "The Applicability of Housing First Models to Homeless Persons with Serious Mental Illness"
And you also have a single image that people get better only through resident treatment. As the paragraph before that states, it's not well understood:
Again, you could try reading the sources already provided and quoted above. Here, I'll bold the important part just for you:
"Housing First forbids requiring beneficiaries, as a condition of receiving assistance, to attend drug rehabilitation programs, look for work, or even take their mental health medicines as directed by a doctor. They can accept services that might be—and often are—offered, but they are under no enforceable obligation to do so. If they take drugs, refuse work, or even are charged with crimes, housing is still available to them."
Under a housing first model, they legally cannot require prospective residents enter treatment as a condition of housing.
That's literally the definition of "Housing First" and why it's doomed to failure.
They can't turn away someone who is in treatment, which is great, but they can't demand someone enter treatment, which is the failure point.
If addicts are given a choice without consequence, they will choose to feed the addiction, they won't seek treatment. That's the nature of addiction. They aren't going to make the right choice of their own volition.
Oregon saw this with the utter failure of Measure 110... Let's legalize drugs, if someone gets caught with drugs, we'll give them a choice:
16,000 people ticketed. Care to guess how many people chose option #2?
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/politics/measure-110-secretary-of-state-audit-drug-decriminalization/283-a6fe5145-42ee-4007-8d19-fc92683436d3
"The agency did get the hotline set up, but had only received 119 calls related to the drug treatment program as of June 2022, at an estimated cost to the program of more than $7,000 per call.
Of those calls, only 27 people were interested in drug treatment resources."
It boggles my mind how you manage to dance around every request for science backed evidence focusing only on your preconceived notions. When you weirdly in the most internet way say I won't read the scientific article cited in the conservative think tank whose only purpose is to skewer housing first and misrepresent it's working. I read it and note that that they misuse the findings of the journal. Silence.
I ask for scientific studies to support your view. There is now several decades of systematic research to support it's role in addressing the homelessness crisis. Why? Is it just because you don't want to read a view that may complicate your prescription? Do you not feel comfortable reading scientific articles? What is going on?
Your definition never mentions the role of case worker in developing goals and creating buy in for compliance. Patience, even highly motivated ones, regularly lapse in compliance. Life changing transformations are not easy.
I provided a quote that we don't have understanding why people get clean. It's not because we force them, that's for sure.
Why do you now bring up 110? Does this have anything to do with Housing First? Or is it part of so opus that addicts are bad children who need to be forced to do what's good for them?
I don't think we're going to meet in a space of mutual understanding. I think your presumptions that there people get clean only if you force them. You just keep on shouting at me that this is true. Show me some evidence because everything I see from scientific studies to front line workers say, "On occasion or happens, but the harm it does to others is far worse."
It boggles my mind how you ignore repeated direct responses to your questions, almost like you aren't actually interested in the answers...
Here it is again, 3rd time on one source, 2nd time on the other. Do I need to use smaller words?
I saw it. I read it. I commented on it.
Do you realize that the Cicero Institute isn't a journal? I wrote elsewhere who they are. They are not a reliable source.
What is wrong with you? Do you not realize we are having a discussion elsewhere in this thread?
It's some child trying his first hand at commenting online. Just overly confident and absolutely full of bullshit.
Fucking Trump empowering dipshits like this.