20 ms·

Working as a librarian gave me PTSD symptoms

217 points by 80mph 7y ago

Haga 7y ago
If I follow a twin-ideology and the world falls to ashes, at what point does that love affair fall apart? Does it ever? There are people in Venezuela who support true socialism even right now. That such comfortable dualism might result in such horrific results, almost as if both had a wrong concept of human nature.
- robertAngst 7y ago
  We can have conversations about the free market fixing these problems. I have money, lets talk about what can be done to solve it. No one gives a care that socialism fails, the problems still exists, and as a result, people will keep trying to solve problems.
harryf 7y ago
Having been lucky enough to grow up in Western Europe, in a “socialist” democracy, I’ve read a lot about the state of poverty in the US and been shocked by visits to San Francisco and Washington to see so many homeless people. I’d thought that seeing a street full or homeless people literally one block over from the Whitehouse was the most shocking thing - it is inconceivable in Western Europe that homelessness would be tolerated near a national monument. But reading this, the idea that libraries are doubling as homeless shelters is the most shocking thing I think I’ve ever encountered about poverty in the US. Sorry to provoke anyone from the US reading this but how badly does your society have to be broken to allow this to become an accepted norm? Given it’s an extremely wealthy country, the cruelty of the system that lets this happen is hard for me to even imagine. This whole “survival of the fittest is what makes America great” crap needs to stop. Period. Because to me that seems like that’s the root cause, the excuse for treating a societies weakest so cruelly. The only discussion should be “how do we fix this?”. OK rant over ... apologies to anyone triggered but genuinely shocked.
- ido 7y ago
  You don’t need to go to America for that - I live in Berlin and visit SF on occasion and didn’t get the impression there are more homeless people in the latter (nor that it is dirtier).
  - ben_w 7y ago
    I also live in Berlin and occasionally visit SF. The homeless present differently, as does the dirt. In Berlin there is more graffiti, but the homeless can make money picking up glass and plastic bottles for the Pfandgeld. (And as an Auslander, finding spent blanks everywhere after New Year was a big schock).
  - DanielleMolloy 7y ago
    I remember leaving the subway for downtown SF, at Union Square for the very first time. My first impression of SF was playing slalom with all the homeless people right on the street. I've been living in southern SF for four months and often saw a saddening amount of poverty that most people just seemed to ignore. I also regularly saw homeless people that were so mentally ill that they appeared very dangerous (especially for a female). Berlin's homeless people become most visible when they enter the subway to politely tell their story and let people know why they need to beg for money. In terms of danger the organized beggar-robber gang type (which are not really homeless people) may be on the rise, but this is no comparison to what could be seen in SF. While there is the occasional lunatic you have to avoid, you usually just feel pity for Berlin's homeless people. There is also, without doubt a relatively stronger social net that can catch more of these human beings. You may also want to check out www.crimemapping.com for more "cultural differences".
- hyperman1 7y ago
  Welcome to Belgium, Europe. Our Library doubles as a homeless shelter too. Shelter shortage.
  - spanxx 7y ago
    I'm not sure about other European countries, as I live in Spain. Here the situation is different. NGOs and the Catholic Church maintain a network or homeless shelters were people are fed and can sleep for free. The government subsidize these organizations instead of focusing on solving this problem itself.
narrator 7y ago
The problem with how we treat the poorest people in the country is that we have a fair number of completely psychotic people who spoil the whole social support network for everyone else by requiring 100x the help everyone else does because they are actively destroying the facilities and people that try to help them. In Western Europe these people are likely held against their will in mental institutions, but in America, especially in San Francisco we'd rather they be out walking around off their meds if they haven't murdered anyone yet. There are homeless people who regularly randomly assault people for no reason and as long as they don't use a weapon they are back out on the street in 24 hours.
- michaelvoz 7y ago
  SF is a open air mental asylum and based on what I see, I think London Breed wants it that way.
  - lrem 7y ago
    Why is it such an expensive place to live in then?
    - michaelvoz 7y ago
      Artificial market constraints through rent control?
    - AFascistWorld 7y ago
      Coz international speculators don't care about the environment.
    - quickthrower2 7y ago
      Californian software is eating the world
- jetrink 7y ago
  > especially in San Francisco we'd rather they be out walking around It's not a question of preference. Our constitution is incompatible with treatment programs that involve indefinite imprisonment when the individual is not a serious threat to himself or others. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas
winkelwagen 7y ago
This quite touched me, I love libraries and when I traveled through the NA I often went in every big city to take some time from all the travel madness. The contrast between the libraries in Toronto and Seattle was quite stark. You could see the diffence between visitors, and there were a ton more homeless people in Seattle. At the time i didn’t think much of it, but I was reflecting back on it after a awesome episode of 99% invisible (palaces of the people). The guest talked about how libraries changed and have a different function. And the importance of something he called social infrastructure as something that doesn’t get seen as important as let’s say, roads and electricity. It’s Very related to what the author of the article is saying. We don’t nearly appreciate enough how libraries function in society. When we keep looking at as a buildings where you can get books and use the internet we totally miss the human side of it and if we don’t equip the people with the skills or experience to deal with it. They are going to be burned out. Hopefully we can recognize the importance libraries have and support them in a way it benefits whole cities.
alvalentini 7y ago
There have been, and continue to be, social experiments proving that giving homeless people a house ends up being less expensive to communities and way more humane. Maybe it's lack of understanding. Maybe lack of knowledge. Maybe selfishness. But it's doable, more efficient and decent.
- _Microft 7y ago
  Or maybe not even a house but just money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-the-best-way-to-end-poverty/2013/12/29/679c8344-5ec8-11e3-95c2-13623eb2b0e1_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-... (I also submitted that as an own thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19705704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19705704 )
  - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
    Unfortunately the "but I worked for my money, so you can't give people money for free"-attitude prevents these sort of pilot programs from moving forward. Never mind that you're actually saving money, giving the homeless a better quality of life, and reduce nuisance for the rest of us.
- praptak 7y ago
  It's the idea that making someone else's life too easy is somehow immoral, especially if they obtain something valuable without the hard work.
  - gbear605 7y ago
    People don’t usually see it as “making life easy is immoral” but as “making their life easier than mine is unfair”
  - kobayashy 7y ago
    You can always make their life easier by giving them YOUR money. Heck, you could even adopt them and house them in your own home. I would respect that. But I don't want one cent of my money to go to these kind of programs, and I think that my stand on this issue should be respected.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
The US seems to be coming to the realization that social welfare is not an altruistic indulgence, but a necessity for an economically wealthy society. These library "residents" force the state - and its workers - to help them by confronting them with their sheer humanity. It is easy to refuse services to people you don't know, it's harder to send them out into the cold face to face. Most Human beings can't stand seeing another Human suffering. It just hurts us. Hurting them, by removing them forcibly, also hurts us.
- robertAngst 7y ago
  Whats the solution? Throw another billion at the problem? Have 80% of it get sucked up by the bureaucracy? And the other 20% is used on surface issues. >social welfare is not an altruistic indulgence Both sides want to help people, the great question is, what is the best way? Should we spend 1B on bandaids? Or should we start earlier in life, giving people opportunities that keep them off the streets?
  - baby 7y ago
    Both. Some people will always need help and we need to man up and provide that help.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    That's exactly the kind of "self-reliancy" and "small government" BS that hasn't worked for the US the past 100 years. Well, it has worked for a small minority which has increasingly enriched itself. If you promote "giving people opportunities that keep them off the streets" as a solution, you profess to a total ignorance of how homelessness in the US (and most developed countries) works. It's not poverty or lack of employment. It's more about mental health and substance abuse. You can offer those people all the jobs you want, without medical and psychological/social help, they don't stand a chance. So yes, "1B on bandaids", like better mental health care for the poor, more social workers, more social housing would be a very good start.
- closeparen 7y ago
  But we won’t. We’ll sit here talking about how important it is to feel the full scale of the problem and how egregious it would be to deny these people any public space, and then we’ll go build maybe 12 supportive housing units.
caymanjim 7y ago
The kind of people who are giving the author PTSD aren't going to be helped by free housing, free money, or free anything other than free medical care, and in the extreme cases, institutionalization. Since we find the idea of involuntarily committing psychiatric patients to be unpalatable these days, we have to either way until they commit a serious crime and go to prison, or live with them on our streets and in our libraries. There are many homeless people who are not socially problematic, but that's not what this article is about. The problem people are incompatible with free housing, because they are violently unstable. They're schizophrenic, drug-dependent, or just plain violent. All these responses about economic considerations or a lack of homeless support infrastructure are totally missing the real issue, which is that some people have such extreme mental illness or other social problem that they are incompatible with peaceful society, and it's not something than can be solved with housing and cash. That is a separate problem entirely.
- thomasz 7y ago
  Other countries, those with a somewhat decent social safety net, do not have such a big problem with homelessness. Particularly not with homeless people making public libraries unusable for the general public.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    Is that really so? Homelessness rates in the US are below those in Sweden, Germany, France, Great Britain and Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
    - mikemotherwell 7y ago
      This is 100% true, but I wonder if the right level of abstraction for the 3rd largest country by population and 4th largest by area. The USA undeniably has a low macro rates of homelessness overall, but I wonder if it has high micro levels of homelessness, e.g. Sydney seems to have lower rates of homelessness than San Francisco or Seattle, even though Australia has a higher homelessness rate than the USA overall. I wonder as I can't find any data that uses the same measurements across cities and countries and is easy to compare. On numbers, Seattle has 12,000 homeless according to wikipedia, and I can't find similar numbers for Sydney. Given Sydney is about 15% larger than greater Seattle, it would need to be closer to 14,000 to be the same. I doubt Sydney has that many Homeless, but with no data I guess it may. I could be completely off base here, but I do think the USA has some really concentrated pockets of homelessness, and that skews people's views, in both directions, based on personal experience.
bookofjoe 7y ago
Speaking as 1) the son of a divorced mother on multiple antipsychotic drugs beginning in her mid-30s for schizophrenia, involuntarily hospitalized multiple times, who routinely discarded her medications as soon as she was discharged because of the terrible side effects, and 2) a retired physician (neurosurgical anesthesiologist x 38 years) who rotated through ERs and psychiatric wards during medical school and residency, then was occasionally paged to the ER to deal with critical airway issues/Code Blues in patients with psychiatric histories: people with major mental health problems are quite often prescribed medicines whose side effects are so crippling and difficult to live with, they'd rather do without. This is the root cause IMHO of much social vexation for the rest of the population. In addition, some homeless people, offered safe shelter and food in a controlled, supervised setting, refuse, fearing loss of freedom or worse. I see no solution that doesn't infringe on their rights as human beings.
- alejohausner 7y ago
  Maybe psychiatry interns should spend a month taking antipsychotics, just to experience the side effects. It would greatly reduce their faith in big pharma.
  - bookofjoe 7y ago
    Odd you should mention this: I have suffered a total of four major depressive episodes including my first at age 29, which culminated in a massive barbiturate/alcohol OD in a serious attempt to commit suicide. Lucky for me, while I was unconscious I vomited and fell out of the bed I chose to die in, landing face down. After three days on a ventilator in a coma, I woke up — still seriously depressed. Then I was transferred to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, where I spent the summer of 1977 and recovered, being discharged on several medications including an antipsychotic. I remained on the drugs for about five years, then went off per my psychiatrist's OK. I was started back on antidepressants and antipsychotics after I became depressed for the second time, in 1991. This time I was able to self-admit myself to a psychiatric hospital before doing myself any harm. I remained on antipsychotics for five years or so, then for the second time withdrew per my psychiatrist's OK. In 2001 my third depression happened, and the usual drug regimen was reinstituted, with the caveat that I needed to stay on them for life. I was fine with that until 2013, when I decided I didn't want to be on them even though for me the side effects weren't that bad. I spent the entire year slowly tapering off each of the four drugs I was on, one at a time. Sure enough, in January 2015, when I was finally drug free, my fourth major depression struck. This one was — by far — the longest, lasting 1.75 YEARS. Once again, onto the usual drugs, but after I recovered in October of 2015, I decided that I'm never again going to stop taking them. As regards Big Pharma, I am thankful for it: without the drugs — and their side effects — I would died a long time ago.
kobayashy 7y ago
I constantly wonder, how come that homeless (mentally ill) always gather in cities when they could be homeless in wilderness. Instead of local/state providing them public spaces in urban area, they should open national parks for homeless where they can exercise their uncivilized behavior. They could hunt rabbits, they could fish, eat berries and so on. Nature will indeed help them more than traumatized librarians.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  It's not that easy to live off the land in the US. Sources of food being the biggest challenge.
  - kobayashy 7y ago
    Yeah, it's much easier for homeless to put a bread on the table by becoming computer scientist in SF. That's why they congregate there.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  Do you have any idea how hard it is to live off the land? There's a reason even animals: raccoons, squirrels and pigeons prefer to live in cities. The living is easier.
  - kobayashy 7y ago
    Following your argument, soon enough librarians will be in charge for cleaning the manure after fauna which evolved enough to make libraries their natural habitat.
    - gerbilly 7y ago
      Maybe but in general, I am unmoved by any slippery slope argument that depends on evolutionary changes to a species.
- topmonk 7y ago
  Where could they get their oxycontin, then?
robertAngst 7y ago
My only gripe about this story, is that they act like Public Libraries are the only places that have crazy people. Working in retail making 7.85$/hr, we had plenty of crazy people. There is something noble about being a librarian, and this article discusses that phenomenon. There was nothing noble about serving enraged customers, customers that stole, or creepy customers.
shitupberd 7y ago
Shut up nerd
CryptoPunk 7y ago
>>Money for low-income housing and social service programs has dwindled for decades. This is not true. Money for low-income housing and social services has massively increased over the last 40 years. The problem is, this approach is not working. The state psychiatric hospitals were closed because of the deinstitutionalization movement which was strongly supported by advocates of the mentally ill. Now they don't want to acknowledge the consequences of that advocacy, and keep blaming the phantom menace of austerity and social spending cuts.
sizzle 7y ago
This is HN, home to some of the smartest problem solving minds. Is there a startup opportunity to make a dent in solving homelessness while also making a profit or is that wishful thinking?
- ken 7y ago
  I don't care for the idea that HN or programmers or engineers or doctors or NASA or any particular subset is home to "the smartest problem solving minds". I've met smart and creative problem solvers in all fields. People tend to solve problems with the tools of their field, and it's telling that your first idea was "a startup opportunity". Really? Our solution for homelessness should also make a profit? We're going to bring our neighbors out of poverty by earning a buck in the process? Where does this money come from? First, start by "doing things that don't scale": solve homelessness for one person. Then do it for 2, 5, and 10. My impression is that, like many human problems, a real solution might never scale.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    Participating in the economy is the usual path to improvement of a population’s standard of living; it’s not outside the realm of possibility that it could work for this one.
  - sizzle 7y ago
    "Our solution for homelessness should also make a profit?" Profits are merely an incentive to getting more individuals involved and VC capital backing is unlikely unless there is an eventual ROI I'd imagine. How that ROI is determined is beyond the point, it could be government subsidies, cryptocurrency/blockchain related, etc.
- originalvichy 7y ago
  How do you profit from people who can’t help themselves? Profit and necessary healthcare are not a good equation. A publically funded health organization is the best solution so far.
hugh4life 7y ago
The last place TempleOS's Terry A Davis did a video before he died was outside a library. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH41gGBVpkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH41gGBVpkE "I really like this library. So uh, come here use their computer and smoke out here. They must have been freaking out because such an impure person was in their presence."
greedo 7y ago
My wife started working at a downtown library 6 months ago. We live in a relatively small Midwest city (300K pop) that is a big college town, as well as the seat of the state government. Everything in this article is familiar to me; nothing is shocking in any way. This is the norm for urban libraries.
haidut 7y ago
Why is nobody in this thread mentioning the the 800lb gorilla in the room?? That is, in a capitalist system the homeless, mentally-ill, "problematic", disturbed, troubled, etc are simply considered useless and frankly purposefully pushed to the edge with the hope that they will simply...die. That is the fundamental truth in any capitalist society - you either deliver value or you perish. Who will pay for these people to be housed, treated, re-integrated, educated, fed, etc in times of largely non-existent real economic growth, where almost 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck? https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-in-5-us-workers-live-paycheck-to-paycheck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-i... The answer is, of course, nobody. For all the talk about caring for the homeless and in general those who are at the bottom of society, the sad/brutal reality is that society as a whole does not want these people around. So, they keep getting squeezed and in turn keep squeezing the few who are willing to help them or at least listen to their woes. That is what is giving the author PTSD, not interacting with mentally ill every day. Namely, the realization that a sizeable minority of the US population are simply considered junk and are purposefully pushed towards death. But she only saw part of the story. The scarier truth is that almost 80% of Americans (all those people living paycheck to paycheck) are only one job loss or chronic illness away from the same faith. More than 2/3 or all banckrupcies are related to medical bills. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most-americans-file-for-bankruptcy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most... And when you add to the above that empathy in general has declined by almost 50% over the last 2 decades you'd have to be a psychopath not to start getting PTSD symptoms or at the very least a very serious case of clinical anxiety disorder or even psychosis. https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/bedj96/the_end_of_empathy_young_people_measure_40_less/ https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/bedj96/the_end_... Just think about this for a second. If most people around you do not give a rat's *ss about you even when you are doing OK, what happens if you meet with bad luck and go downhill?? Anxiety, depression, bipolar, psychosis, suicide, etc - all of these can be explained rather easily by the simple reality that most people live in terror every day to be surrounded by people they do not care about and those do not care in return.

217 points by 80mph 7y ago

Haga 7y ago

If I follow a twin-ideology and the world falls to ashes, at what point does that love affair fall apart? Does it ever? There are people in Venezuela who support true socialism even right now. That such comfortable dualism might result in such horrific results, almost as if both had a wrong concept of human nature.

robertAngst 7y ago
We can have conversations about the free market fixing these problems. I have money, lets talk about what can be done to solve it. No one gives a care that socialism fails, the problems still exists, and as a result, people will keep trying to solve problems.

harryf 7y ago

Having been lucky enough to grow up in Western Europe, in a “socialist” democracy, I’ve read a lot about the state of poverty in the US and been shocked by visits to San Francisco and Washington to see so many homeless people. I’d thought that seeing a street full or homeless people literally one block over from the Whitehouse was the most shocking thing - it is inconceivable in Western Europe that homelessness would be tolerated near a national monument. But reading this, the idea that libraries are doubling as homeless shelters is the most shocking thing I think I’ve ever encountered about poverty in the US. Sorry to provoke anyone from the US reading this but how badly does your society have to be broken to allow this to become an accepted norm? Given it’s an extremely wealthy country, the cruelty of the system that lets this happen is hard for me to even imagine. This whole “survival of the fittest is what makes America great” crap needs to stop. Period. Because to me that seems like that’s the root cause, the excuse for treating a societies weakest so cruelly. The only discussion should be “how do we fix this?”. OK rant over ... apologies to anyone triggered but genuinely shocked.

ido 7y ago
You don’t need to go to America for that - I live in Berlin and visit SF on occasion and didn’t get the impression there are more homeless people in the latter (nor that it is dirtier).
- ben_w 7y ago
  I also live in Berlin and occasionally visit SF. The homeless present differently, as does the dirt. In Berlin there is more graffiti, but the homeless can make money picking up glass and plastic bottles for the Pfandgeld. (And as an Auslander, finding spent blanks everywhere after New Year was a big schock).
- DanielleMolloy 7y ago
  I remember leaving the subway for downtown SF, at Union Square for the very first time. My first impression of SF was playing slalom with all the homeless people right on the street. I've been living in southern SF for four months and often saw a saddening amount of poverty that most people just seemed to ignore. I also regularly saw homeless people that were so mentally ill that they appeared very dangerous (especially for a female). Berlin's homeless people become most visible when they enter the subway to politely tell their story and let people know why they need to beg for money. In terms of danger the organized beggar-robber gang type (which are not really homeless people) may be on the rise, but this is no comparison to what could be seen in SF. While there is the occasional lunatic you have to avoid, you usually just feel pity for Berlin's homeless people. There is also, without doubt a relatively stronger social net that can catch more of these human beings. You may also want to check out www.crimemapping.com for more "cultural differences".
hyperman1 7y ago
Welcome to Belgium, Europe. Our Library doubles as a homeless shelter too. Shelter shortage.
- spanxx 7y ago
  I'm not sure about other European countries, as I live in Spain. Here the situation is different. NGOs and the Catholic Church maintain a network or homeless shelters were people are fed and can sleep for free. The government subsidize these organizations instead of focusing on solving this problem itself.

narrator 7y ago

The problem with how we treat the poorest people in the country is that we have a fair number of completely psychotic people who spoil the whole social support network for everyone else by requiring 100x the help everyone else does because they are actively destroying the facilities and people that try to help them. In Western Europe these people are likely held against their will in mental institutions, but in America, especially in San Francisco we'd rather they be out walking around off their meds if they haven't murdered anyone yet. There are homeless people who regularly randomly assault people for no reason and as long as they don't use a weapon they are back out on the street in 24 hours.

michaelvoz 7y ago
SF is a open air mental asylum and based on what I see, I think London Breed wants it that way.
- lrem 7y ago
  Why is it such an expensive place to live in then?
  - michaelvoz 7y ago
    Artificial market constraints through rent control?
  - AFascistWorld 7y ago
    Coz international speculators don't care about the environment.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    Californian software is eating the world
jetrink 7y ago
> especially in San Francisco we'd rather they be out walking around It's not a question of preference. Our constitution is incompatible with treatment programs that involve indefinite imprisonment when the individual is not a serious threat to himself or others. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas

winkelwagen 7y ago

This quite touched me, I love libraries and when I traveled through the NA I often went in every big city to take some time from all the travel madness. The contrast between the libraries in Toronto and Seattle was quite stark. You could see the diffence between visitors, and there were a ton more homeless people in Seattle. At the time i didn’t think much of it, but I was reflecting back on it after a awesome episode of 99% invisible (palaces of the people). The guest talked about how libraries changed and have a different function. And the importance of something he called social infrastructure as something that doesn’t get seen as important as let’s say, roads and electricity. It’s Very related to what the author of the article is saying. We don’t nearly appreciate enough how libraries function in society. When we keep looking at as a buildings where you can get books and use the internet we totally miss the human side of it and if we don’t equip the people with the skills or experience to deal with it. They are going to be burned out. Hopefully we can recognize the importance libraries have and support them in a way it benefits whole cities.

alvalentini 7y ago

There have been, and continue to be, social experiments proving that giving homeless people a house ends up being less expensive to communities and way more humane. Maybe it's lack of understanding. Maybe lack of knowledge. Maybe selfishness. But it's doable, more efficient and decent.

_Microft 7y ago
Or maybe not even a house but just money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-the-best-way-to-end-poverty/2013/12/29/679c8344-5ec8-11e3-95c2-13623eb2b0e1_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-... (I also submitted that as an own thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19705704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19705704 )
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  Unfortunately the "but I worked for my money, so you can't give people money for free"-attitude prevents these sort of pilot programs from moving forward. Never mind that you're actually saving money, giving the homeless a better quality of life, and reduce nuisance for the rest of us.
praptak 7y ago
It's the idea that making someone else's life too easy is somehow immoral, especially if they obtain something valuable without the hard work.
- gbear605 7y ago
  People don’t usually see it as “making life easy is immoral” but as “making their life easier than mine is unfair”
- kobayashy 7y ago
  You can always make their life easier by giving them YOUR money. Heck, you could even adopt them and house them in your own home. I would respect that. But I don't want one cent of my money to go to these kind of programs, and I think that my stand on this issue should be respected.

bayesian_horse 7y ago

The US seems to be coming to the realization that social welfare is not an altruistic indulgence, but a necessity for an economically wealthy society. These library "residents" force the state - and its workers - to help them by confronting them with their sheer humanity. It is easy to refuse services to people you don't know, it's harder to send them out into the cold face to face. Most Human beings can't stand seeing another Human suffering. It just hurts us. Hurting them, by removing them forcibly, also hurts us.

robertAngst 7y ago
Whats the solution? Throw another billion at the problem? Have 80% of it get sucked up by the bureaucracy? And the other 20% is used on surface issues. >social welfare is not an altruistic indulgence Both sides want to help people, the great question is, what is the best way? Should we spend 1B on bandaids? Or should we start earlier in life, giving people opportunities that keep them off the streets?
- baby 7y ago
  Both. Some people will always need help and we need to man up and provide that help.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  That's exactly the kind of "self-reliancy" and "small government" BS that hasn't worked for the US the past 100 years. Well, it has worked for a small minority which has increasingly enriched itself. If you promote "giving people opportunities that keep them off the streets" as a solution, you profess to a total ignorance of how homelessness in the US (and most developed countries) works. It's not poverty or lack of employment. It's more about mental health and substance abuse. You can offer those people all the jobs you want, without medical and psychological/social help, they don't stand a chance. So yes, "1B on bandaids", like better mental health care for the poor, more social workers, more social housing would be a very good start.
closeparen 7y ago
But we won’t. We’ll sit here talking about how important it is to feel the full scale of the problem and how egregious it would be to deny these people any public space, and then we’ll go build maybe 12 supportive housing units.

caymanjim 7y ago

The kind of people who are giving the author PTSD aren't going to be helped by free housing, free money, or free anything other than free medical care, and in the extreme cases, institutionalization. Since we find the idea of involuntarily committing psychiatric patients to be unpalatable these days, we have to either way until they commit a serious crime and go to prison, or live with them on our streets and in our libraries. There are many homeless people who are not socially problematic, but that's not what this article is about. The problem people are incompatible with free housing, because they are violently unstable. They're schizophrenic, drug-dependent, or just plain violent. All these responses about economic considerations or a lack of homeless support infrastructure are totally missing the real issue, which is that some people have such extreme mental illness or other social problem that they are incompatible with peaceful society, and it's not something than can be solved with housing and cash. That is a separate problem entirely.

thomasz 7y ago
Other countries, those with a somewhat decent social safety net, do not have such a big problem with homelessness. Particularly not with homeless people making public libraries unusable for the general public.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  Is that really so? Homelessness rates in the US are below those in Sweden, Germany, France, Great Britain and Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
  - mikemotherwell 7y ago
    This is 100% true, but I wonder if the right level of abstraction for the 3rd largest country by population and 4th largest by area. The USA undeniably has a low macro rates of homelessness overall, but I wonder if it has high micro levels of homelessness, e.g. Sydney seems to have lower rates of homelessness than San Francisco or Seattle, even though Australia has a higher homelessness rate than the USA overall. I wonder as I can't find any data that uses the same measurements across cities and countries and is easy to compare. On numbers, Seattle has 12,000 homeless according to wikipedia, and I can't find similar numbers for Sydney. Given Sydney is about 15% larger than greater Seattle, it would need to be closer to 14,000 to be the same. I doubt Sydney has that many Homeless, but with no data I guess it may. I could be completely off base here, but I do think the USA has some really concentrated pockets of homelessness, and that skews people's views, in both directions, based on personal experience.

bookofjoe 7y ago

Speaking as 1) the son of a divorced mother on multiple antipsychotic drugs beginning in her mid-30s for schizophrenia, involuntarily hospitalized multiple times, who routinely discarded her medications as soon as she was discharged because of the terrible side effects, and 2) a retired physician (neurosurgical anesthesiologist x 38 years) who rotated through ERs and psychiatric wards during medical school and residency, then was occasionally paged to the ER to deal with critical airway issues/Code Blues in patients with psychiatric histories: people with major mental health problems are quite often prescribed medicines whose side effects are so crippling and difficult to live with, they'd rather do without. This is the root cause IMHO of much social vexation for the rest of the population. In addition, some homeless people, offered safe shelter and food in a controlled, supervised setting, refuse, fearing loss of freedom or worse. I see no solution that doesn't infringe on their rights as human beings.

alejohausner 7y ago
Maybe psychiatry interns should spend a month taking antipsychotics, just to experience the side effects. It would greatly reduce their faith in big pharma.
- bookofjoe 7y ago
  Odd you should mention this: I have suffered a total of four major depressive episodes including my first at age 29, which culminated in a massive barbiturate/alcohol OD in a serious attempt to commit suicide. Lucky for me, while I was unconscious I vomited and fell out of the bed I chose to die in, landing face down. After three days on a ventilator in a coma, I woke up — still seriously depressed. Then I was transferred to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, where I spent the summer of 1977 and recovered, being discharged on several medications including an antipsychotic. I remained on the drugs for about five years, then went off per my psychiatrist's OK. I was started back on antidepressants and antipsychotics after I became depressed for the second time, in 1991. This time I was able to self-admit myself to a psychiatric hospital before doing myself any harm. I remained on antipsychotics for five years or so, then for the second time withdrew per my psychiatrist's OK. In 2001 my third depression happened, and the usual drug regimen was reinstituted, with the caveat that I needed to stay on them for life. I was fine with that until 2013, when I decided I didn't want to be on them even though for me the side effects weren't that bad. I spent the entire year slowly tapering off each of the four drugs I was on, one at a time. Sure enough, in January 2015, when I was finally drug free, my fourth major depression struck. This one was — by far — the longest, lasting 1.75 YEARS. Once again, onto the usual drugs, but after I recovered in October of 2015, I decided that I'm never again going to stop taking them. As regards Big Pharma, I am thankful for it: without the drugs — and their side effects — I would died a long time ago.

kobayashy 7y ago

I constantly wonder, how come that homeless (mentally ill) always gather in cities when they could be homeless in wilderness. Instead of local/state providing them public spaces in urban area, they should open national parks for homeless where they can exercise their uncivilized behavior. They could hunt rabbits, they could fish, eat berries and so on. Nature will indeed help them more than traumatized librarians.

paulryanrogers 7y ago
It's not that easy to live off the land in the US. Sources of food being the biggest challenge.
- kobayashy 7y ago
  Yeah, it's much easier for homeless to put a bread on the table by becoming computer scientist in SF. That's why they congregate there.
gerbilly 7y ago
Do you have any idea how hard it is to live off the land? There's a reason even animals: raccoons, squirrels and pigeons prefer to live in cities. The living is easier.
- kobayashy 7y ago
  Following your argument, soon enough librarians will be in charge for cleaning the manure after fauna which evolved enough to make libraries their natural habitat.
  - gerbilly 7y ago
    Maybe but in general, I am unmoved by any slippery slope argument that depends on evolutionary changes to a species.
topmonk 7y ago
Where could they get their oxycontin, then?

robertAngst 7y ago

My only gripe about this story, is that they act like Public Libraries are the only places that have crazy people. Working in retail making 7.85$/hr, we had plenty of crazy people. There is something noble about being a librarian, and this article discusses that phenomenon. There was nothing noble about serving enraged customers, customers that stole, or creepy customers.

shitupberd 7y ago

Shut up nerd

CryptoPunk 7y ago

>>Money for low-income housing and social service programs has dwindled for decades. This is not true. Money for low-income housing and social services has massively increased over the last 40 years. The problem is, this approach is not working. The state psychiatric hospitals were closed because of the deinstitutionalization movement which was strongly supported by advocates of the mentally ill. Now they don't want to acknowledge the consequences of that advocacy, and keep blaming the phantom menace of austerity and social spending cuts.

sizzle 7y ago

This is HN, home to some of the smartest problem solving minds. Is there a startup opportunity to make a dent in solving homelessness while also making a profit or is that wishful thinking?

ken 7y ago
I don't care for the idea that HN or programmers or engineers or doctors or NASA or any particular subset is home to "the smartest problem solving minds". I've met smart and creative problem solvers in all fields. People tend to solve problems with the tools of their field, and it's telling that your first idea was "a startup opportunity". Really? Our solution for homelessness should also make a profit? We're going to bring our neighbors out of poverty by earning a buck in the process? Where does this money come from? First, start by "doing things that don't scale": solve homelessness for one person. Then do it for 2, 5, and 10. My impression is that, like many human problems, a real solution might never scale.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Participating in the economy is the usual path to improvement of a population’s standard of living; it’s not outside the realm of possibility that it could work for this one.
- sizzle 7y ago
  "Our solution for homelessness should also make a profit?" Profits are merely an incentive to getting more individuals involved and VC capital backing is unlikely unless there is an eventual ROI I'd imagine. How that ROI is determined is beyond the point, it could be government subsidies, cryptocurrency/blockchain related, etc.
originalvichy 7y ago
How do you profit from people who can’t help themselves? Profit and necessary healthcare are not a good equation. A publically funded health organization is the best solution so far.

hugh4life 7y ago

The last place TempleOS's Terry A Davis did a video before he died was outside a library. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH41gGBVpkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH41gGBVpkE "I really like this library. So uh, come here use their computer and smoke out here. They must have been freaking out because such an impure person was in their presence."

greedo 7y ago

My wife started working at a downtown library 6 months ago. We live in a relatively small Midwest city (300K pop) that is a big college town, as well as the seat of the state government. Everything in this article is familiar to me; nothing is shocking in any way. This is the norm for urban libraries.

haidut 7y ago

Why is nobody in this thread mentioning the the 800lb gorilla in the room?? That is, in a capitalist system the homeless, mentally-ill, "problematic", disturbed, troubled, etc are simply considered useless and frankly purposefully pushed to the edge with the hope that they will simply...die. That is the fundamental truth in any capitalist society - you either deliver value or you perish. Who will pay for these people to be housed, treated, re-integrated, educated, fed, etc in times of largely non-existent real economic growth, where almost 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck? https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-in-5-us-workers-live-paycheck-to-paycheck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-i... The answer is, of course, nobody. For all the talk about caring for the homeless and in general those who are at the bottom of society, the sad/brutal reality is that society as a whole does not want these people around. So, they keep getting squeezed and in turn keep squeezing the few who are willing to help them or at least listen to their woes. That is what is giving the author PTSD, not interacting with mentally ill every day. Namely, the realization that a sizeable minority of the US population are simply considered junk and are purposefully pushed towards death. But she only saw part of the story. The scarier truth is that almost 80% of Americans (all those people living paycheck to paycheck) are only one job loss or chronic illness away from the same faith. More than 2/3 or all banckrupcies are related to medical bills. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most-americans-file-for-bankruptcy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most... And when you add to the above that empathy in general has declined by almost 50% over the last 2 decades you'd have to be a psychopath not to start getting PTSD symptoms or at the very least a very serious case of clinical anxiety disorder or even psychosis. https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/bedj96/the_end_of_empathy_young_people_measure_40_less/ https://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/bedj96/the_end_... Just think about this for a second. If most people around you do not give a rat's *ss about you even when you are doing OK, what happens if you meet with bad luck and go downhill?? Anxiety, depression, bipolar, psychosis, suicide, etc - all of these can be explained rather easily by the simple reality that most people live in terror every day to be surrounded by people they do not care about and those do not care in return.