this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Being out on the street is undoubtedly bad but you should not be clamoring to return to the days of stuffing homeless people into mental institutions. Indefinite involuntary commitment without trial or appeal is barbaric and that's setting aside the kind of "treatments" they used and what they considered "disorders".
Please, just give them homes.
I'm with you that the state should provide housing for them.
But schizophrenia is a serious disease and is prevalent (20%) in this group. Those people need psychiatric help. Only a home won't fix it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6880407/
I do not think an elevated incidence of a specific mental illness among a population makes it justifiable to legalize throwing them all into indefinite psychiatric detention without oversight or trial. I’m all for having facilities where schizophrenic people can get care they need in a safe environment. I’m not for using those institutions as homeless storage facilities because people can’t separate homelessness from mental illness in their head. You can and should address both separately.
Nobody wants to stash all homeless people in psychiatric care, unlimited at that. That would overload their capacity thousandfold and makes no sense, this shit is expensive. Right now it seems you're pushing some kind of narrative... Can you back up your claims?
What claims are you asking me to back up specifically? The meme above is evidence enough that people believe institutions are an appropriate solution to homelessness, but if you're looking for more evidence of those claims: you can find plenty such arguments in a cursory google search.
Any such policy would be de-facto unlimited because homeless people don't stop being homeless when you discharge them from an institution. You could just have them committed again.
B-But why would we waste taxpayer money into improving the welfare of the people?
There's a middle ground, isn't there? Like there are people out there that won't get better without forced intervention. It's not electroshock or nothing, we have more knowledge about proper humane treatment now.
The middle ground is give them homes and counseling. Not give people an easy way to shove the problem out of sight while creating another private prison industry.
Not all homeless are mentally ill. Asylums are not a place for people without homes. The notion that every person living on the street has something wrong with them that will fix their homelessness if you treat it is absurd, dangerous, and insulting.
They thought what they were doing at the time was proper and humane, too. Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness until 1973. Conversion therapy is still a thing. How many modern-day therapists do you think would try to "treat" a homeless trans person who winds up in their asylum?
That's fair. I do also believe in just giving people homes and therapy. I also think that there are people who need more help than just that.
There are, absolutely, but that's something you could say about both housed and unhoused. Those concerns should be kept separated. Conflating mental illness with homelessness just causes stigma and gives people an excuse to pretend like the cause, and thus solution, lies within the individuals who end up homeless rather than how society is structured and governed.
In Europe they have sanitariums which I think can help keep people safe without them being prisoners.
Locally there is just social safety net after safety net. If you talk to any homeless that are left over, they have moral differences and reject the help or care, or they are not homeless just addicted and need the extra money from begging to pay for more highs. They go back to their managed group home for dinner and lodging.
Give everyone homes and you prevent a lot more problems as well.
Right to housing would help so many people better their lives by leaving bad situations they are only in because they don't have any where else.
We would all benefit by not having to suffer just to have a safe place to sleep. We wouldnt have to enslave ourselves to other people or employers and could make better choices for our lives(even though people will still make bad choices)
Sorry, but this is idealistic hogwash. Giving people homes does not solve debilitating mental illnesses like schizophrenia, nor does it solve drug addiction.
Housing should be universal, but rehabilitation of some sort is needed for a large plurality of homeless people and just throwing them into an apartment does not heal social ills.
Throwing homeless people into asylums doesn't solve homelessness unless you intend to keep them there forever. Mental illness is over represented in homeless populations but correlation is not causation. Homelessness is not a mental illness.
Using due process to put people (housed or not) with serious mental illnesses into a dedicated care facility is fine. Suggesting that all homeless belong in there as a matter of policy is just an excuse to sweep them out of sight without solving any underlying issues by just assuming that the underlying issues are all mental illness.
That's my point. My desire is a system where the homeless are assisted in transition back to normal life, including rehab if they're suffering from addiction.
I don't believe all the ills of the homeless are tied to mental illness.
Then I'm not really sure what your point has to do with mine. What you're describing is not what Regan destroyed through deinstitutionalization, and I wouldn't really call a system like that a "mental institution".