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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 t

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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
    - gridlockd 8y ago
      The question is, does homelessness become more of a problem if it is "more concentrated"? I would argue that for the homeless individual, it actually doesn't. It's in fact probably better to be homeless in a place that is already accustomed to homeless people. Of course for the perception of a non-homeless person, the problem will appear more drastic with a higher concentration.
  - thomasz 8y ago
    That list is a great example on how you have to treat wikipedia with a healthy dose of scepticism. It's original research of the worst case: A list of figures from different decades(!), extracted from random news sites, without any trace of even trying to explain that there is no globally accepted definition of homelessness and that those numbers likely measure very different phenomena. Furthermore, most of these figures includes people that are insufficiently housed like on a friends couch, in a windowless room, in temporary shelters and such, and do not tell you much about the population of people "on the streets".
    - gridlockd 8y ago
      Fair enough, but you literally gave zero evidence for your claim that "Other countries, those with a somewhat decent social safety net, do not have such a big problem with homelessness". You should at least consider the possibility that what you said isn't really true and just fits your preconceived notion of a heartless US society versus a supposedly more social environment in Europe.
      - thomasz 8y ago
        Heartlessness isn’t a factor here. At least individually I’d say that people over here are way more indifferent towards the homeless. There is very little enthusiasm in terms of volunteering and such.
        mter 8y ago
        Where is over here? The US leads the world in volunteering. https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO4.1-Participation-voluntary-work.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO4.1-Participation-voluntar... You can also look at BLS info: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/volun.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/volun.pdf Most cities have programs with volunteering with the homeless, just visit a nearby church and ask. Clothes, food and resumes are pretty popular things to help with.
        thomasz 8y ago
jMyles 8y ago
But you're ignoring a simple reality: people go to libraries because there is no other place to go. Why as a society have we decided that libraries are where hurting people are to be herded? That librarians are their outlet to be heard? We need more and richer commons, and particularly places that encourage healthy people to stay healthy and sick people to get well.
- tomrod 8y ago
  When did you decide that libraries are waystations for the wounded, as a member of society? I'm curious, because this underlies your notion. Personally, I see it in practical terms. Regarding the policy of using a library as a resource center, giving people access to computers and training materials is a pretty darn good idea for folks who want to enrich their careers or other domains of life.
- crediblewitness 8y ago
  The comment you are replying to answers your question. Q. Why as a society have we decided that libraries are where hurting people are to be herded? A. "...we find the idea of involuntarily committing psychiatric patients to be unpalatable these days..."
  - tyingq 8y ago
    That's sort of right. It's not that we find it morally unacceptable to involuntarily commit people. It's that we don't want to pay for it. We shut down all the state mental hospitals. Which moved that population to jails, prisons, and the streets.
    - alejohausner 8y ago
      Taxpayers may have thought that mental asylums were expensive, but jails are very expensive. It's a lot cheaper to keep a schizophrenic in a state hospital. So I'm not sure that the decision to empty the state hospitals was driven by taxpayer stinginess. The whole thing is complicated. Drug companies in the 60s and 70s advertised their antipsychotics very hard. They persuaded the public that drugs could cure mental illness. That was a big force behind the emptying of the hospitals. Lots of short-sighted thinking.
truckerbill 8y ago
A lot of these people, I would wager the majority , had bad childhoods. Resulting from vicious cycles caused (in part) by poverty. I would also wager in a fairer parallel universe where this wasn't the case, a good number of these people wouldn't have grown up to be as mentally ill as they are.
- jnbiche 8y ago
  Schizophrenia -- responsible for much of the extreme behavior that librarians see -- is an organic disease that affects both the rich and poor at equal rates. It has nothing to do with how you were raised. It's true that wealthy families can afford much better care for their schizophrenic family members, but poverty certainly does not cause schizophrenia. Otherwise, I strongly agree with you that generational poverty is a critical societal problem to be solved.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    >Schizophrenia -- responsible for much of the extreme behavior that librarians see -- is an organic disease that affects both the rich and poor at equal rates. A laundry-list of adverse life experiences associated with poverty are known to increase the risk of schizophrenia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181718/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181718/
    - gameswithgo 8y ago
      correlation or causation?
      - gbear605 8y ago
        Of course that study can’t prove causation (not going to do a randomized trial on risk factors that cause schizophrenia), but they only looked at risk factors prior to onset, so that should be a good proxy.
    - jnbiche 8y ago
jdietrich 8y ago
>Since we find the idea of involuntarily committing psychiatric patients to be unpalatable these days We closed the asylums, because the long-term detention of the mentally ill is costly and inhumane. We can do better than just warehousing people in pseudo-prisons. We completely failed to provide adequate support in the community for people with severe and enduring mental illness, which is why so many people are trapped in a cycle of homelessness and incarceration. Most of these people aren't "incompatible with peaceful society", they just need help and can't get it. If any one factor is to blame, it's the systematic defunding of social work and community mental health. If your local library is full of mentally ill homeless people, the fundamental questions are why do these people have nowhere else to go? and why is nobody here who actually has the training to help these people?.
- germinalphrase 8y ago
  In complete agreement. Consider also the historical uniqueness of public libraries: if they didn't already exist in the fabric of civic life, would we really have the political ability to build them? We have little imagination or desire to build civic institutions any more; we only know how to build commercial ones.
  - eru 8y ago
    It's not just civic institutions. Manhattan would be illegal to build these days in Manhattan. I'm glad that incapacity hasn't affected the whole world, yet. But it's seems to be spreading.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      >Manhattan would be illegal to build these days in Manhattan I don't really view that particularly to be a problem. Manhattan was already built in Manhattan, it doesn't need to be built there again. Now that it exists, it needs to be managed with the new problems that have arisen since the building of Manhattan. Problems change when you scale, things that were not a problem when you were growing are now a problem after you achieve massive success "Do things that don't scale" is great advice for a growing startup, and for a very good reason. Because once you get to Manhattan size, you have to start doing things that do scale. If Manhattan hadn't changed its building codes, it would be unlivable today.
JohnStrangeII 8y ago
The problem is that you don't offer any solution. Sure, some homeless people, schizophrenics, and sociopaths are unpleasant to deal with and will find themselves unwanted wherever they go, both due to their own actions and due to prejudices and fear. They go to libraries, house entrances, metro stations, and so on because they have no other places to go. Putting them out of your sight will not make the problem go away. The solutions are obvious and not mysterious at all. What do most of them need? Good social programs, free health care, job programs that work and are not just designed to "improve" statistics, personal mentoring, places to go where their few belongings are safe and they are not surrounded by criminals and troublemakers all the time, proper psychiatric care, drug help centres with medical professionals who are not allowed to cooperate with the police except in case of capital crimes, and so on and so on. What do they not need? Well, there are always hard cases and dangerous criminals can be mentally ill like anybody else, but generally speaking, as a rule of thumb, the last place you'd want to put them are US prisons, because the people who leave them are more likely to be mentally ill than the people who enter them. The quality of a society can be measured directly by how they deal with their outcasts and troublemakers.
- gridlockd 8y ago
  > The solutions are obvious and not mysterious at all. Good social programs, free health care, job programs that work and are not just designed to "improve" statistics, personal mentoring, places to go where their few belongings are safe and they are not surrounded by criminals and troublemakers all the time, proper psychiatric care, drug help centres with medical professionals... All these things exist in many developed countries, but they don't solve the problem either. Schizophrenic people in particular are unlikely to actually accept help. They're incapable of appropriately judging the reality around them. They can't tell if somebody is genuinely trying to help or if they're "out to get them". So you would have to force them into psychiatric care, but that's often not legally possible, and for good historic reasons.
  - macspoofing 8y ago
    >and for good historic reasons. Is it? I'm not convinced that we haven't over-inflated the harm of psychiatric institutions from 50s and 60s and 70s. I wonder if the spate of horror movies set in mental institutions are partly to blame in addition to over-focus on practices that have long been banned.
TulliusCicero 8y ago
I suspect free housing and other social safety nets would prevent people from deteriorating to this state, or at least mitigate the effects. I imagine other developed countries don't have this problem to this extent. What do Denmark or Japan do that we can learn from?
- rayiner 8y ago
  The US does pretty well in terms of homelessness rates (see link above—half the rate of Sweden). Japan’s is a lot lower, but Japan relies primarily on private charity to deal with homelessness. (Mental health issues are much more stigmatized than they are in the US. It’s relatively recently that Japan even started seriously studying the problems of homelessness at the government level.)
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    The US apparently has a much higher rate of unsheltered homeless people though. This is a quora answer, but there are sources at the bottom: https://www.quora.com/Is-homelessness-as-bad-in-Scandinavia-as-it-is-in-the-USA https://www.quora.com/Is-homelessness-as-bad-in-Scandinavia-...
mlrtime 8y ago
I've had this conversation with people in other countries when they ask why there are so many homeless in America. I ask them what their country does with mentally unstable homeless? They're response is they are not allowed to live on the street and they are "picked up". We can decide to let people have complete autonomy or they can be "picked up".
- walterstucco 8y ago
  Picked up means that they are taken freely to an hospital, they give them a bed, food, they check their conditions and can sleep there a night or two. At least in Italy, where my parents worked in hospitals and took care of many homeless or just troubled people. It's not like the Nazis taking prisoners to the camps...
- apexalpha 8y ago
  Mhh, in my country they're only picked up when its too cold to stay outside. Other than that we have many shelters where people can stay overnight for a euro or so.
  - mlrtime 8y ago
    As there are in LA and NYC. Many people don't want to go for whatever reason so they stay on the street.
macspoofing 8y ago
>and in the extreme cases, institutionalization. Worse than that, the family and loved ones of the homeless individual have almost no rights to institutionalize them to get them the care they need. It is unbelievable that we're OK with it.
baby 8y ago
I don't buy the "incompatible with society" argument. It just sounds like an excuse not to help them. If you were in their shoes you would probably go crazy too. Just yestersay some spanish tourists were asking me why were there so many homeless people in SF. I told them "America".
- stordoff 8y ago
  > I told them "America". How w is this an A answer? It doesn't tell you anything about _Why_ there are so many homeless people.
  - baby 8y ago
    American people will in general not fight for the man. They will fight against wellfare, healthcare, aids, etc
DanHulton 8y ago
While obviously some are mentally unstable, and that's what drives them to the streets, what's being ignored in this conversation is that being on the streets drives many to mental instability. Being homeless makes it difficult to find safely and sleep. Even a few days of that condition is extremely mentally taxing. Months or years? It's no surprise that so many of the homeless we see have mental issues. No surprise at all.
- chongli 8y ago
  Lots of people who are homeless aren't living it rough on the streets, they're couch surfing or sleeping in their car. It's generally the people with some sort of mental illness who end up in the streets, because they are too unstable to be tolerated anywhere else. I don't think there's any evidence to show that being homeless causes schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis. Depression and bitterness, sure, but likely not psychosis.
  - DanHulton 8y ago
    The first thing I found when looking was references to this study: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/loose-link-from-mental-health-to-homeless/news-story/34ae40327635d240ef4e12cc7122c940 https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/loose-link-f... > Their results, released this week, reveal just over 30 per cent had a mental disorder. > "The figure was much lower than the community perception and what other researchers had put out there," Dr Johnson told AAP. > About 15 per cent had a mental illness before becoming homeless, while slightly more, 16 per cent, developed a disorder while on the street. Sure, one study in one city, but assuming it's roughly correct, roughly half (if not more) of the homeless with mental illnesses developed them after living on the street. So in addition to simply helping people not, you know, be homeless anymore, it would very likely reduce the amount of mental illnesses suffered by those who are and have been homeless.
    - chongli 8y ago
      Again, I think this author is equivocating on the word homeless. Most homeless are not the people yelling incoherent obscenities on the sidewalk. Additionally, with something like schizophrenia, a person can have the disease and under medical care be able to function at a high level. If, for some reason, they fall out of medical care and stop taking their medication, their symptoms can rapidly spiral out of control and lead to the sort of paranoid, potentially violent, homeless person described in the librarian article. This doesn't mean their mental illness was caused by homelessness, it just means homelessness enabled it to fully manifest itself.
AnthonyMouse 8y 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. That isn't really true. Even among those with mental illness, we can divide those into two groups, those whose illness isn't treatable using current methods and those who are. For the first case, "free healthcare" doesn't work, because they're incurable. The only real option for a violent person with an incurable mental illness is prison or something so similar to prison as makes no difference in practice. For the second case, free money does work, because when the problem is access to healthcare, money can be used to buy healthcare. (And when the problem is something else, money can be used to buy something else.) Particularly when you combine this with some kind of system for a homeless person to be evaluated by a doctor when referred by someone like this librarian. Because once they go to the doctor and get what they need in terms of medication, once they're on the medication they would have the wherewithal to use the money to continue taking the medication (and then ideally get into a state where they no longer have to live on the street).
- thatfrenchguy 8y ago
  For the first case, free healthcare does work because they get institutionalised even if they don't have money. If you have a decent system, those places are a million times better than prisons.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    We had state institutions at one point. They were basically prisons. Moreover, any kind of forced institutionalization is always "free" -- it's not as if you can get out of it for lack of money.
drb91 8y ago
I can’t imagine having so many mental issues I can’t get any benefit from shelter. Secondly, most mentally ill people are not violently psychotic, you asshole.
ficklepickle 8y ago
I'd have to politely disagree. Formerly being one of these "hopeless cases", and now being a productive, healthy member of society, I feel like I have some insight into the matter. Treatment, support and stability help immensely. We do none of that for the must vulnerable members of society. People don't end up like that overnight usually, it takes their mental health being neglected a long time. Often times the trauma starts in childhood. Can you blame them for that? A real issue is ignorance and the resulting lack of compassion. Everyone is insecure about something, but some people make themselves feel better by judging others. The fact of the matter is we are all a few bad strokes of luck away from squabbling in the gutter. Some egos are too fragile to admit that. Some unfortunate people may be unable to live in society, but they are in the minority and you don't know if they will respond to treatment until you try. I am astonished that you put drug dependence in the same category as just plain violent. Mental health issues aren't a moral failing, and treating them as such further ostracizes already marginalized people. Antisocial behavior arises when people feel rejected by society. Instead of blaming individuals from your position of privilege, perhaps you should consider the society and systems that created them. I hope you never find out just how thin the line is.

thomasz 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
  - gridlockd 8y ago
    The question is, does homelessness become more of a problem if it is "more concentrated"? I would argue that for the homeless individual, it actually doesn't. It's in fact probably better to be homeless in a place that is already accustomed to homeless people. Of course for the perception of a non-homeless person, the problem will appear more drastic with a higher concentration.
- thomasz 8y ago
  That list is a great example on how you have to treat wikipedia with a healthy dose of scepticism. It's original research of the worst case: A list of figures from different decades(!), extracted from random news sites, without any trace of even trying to explain that there is no globally accepted definition of homelessness and that those numbers likely measure very different phenomena. Furthermore, most of these figures includes people that are insufficiently housed like on a friends couch, in a windowless room, in temporary shelters and such, and do not tell you much about the population of people "on the streets".
  - gridlockd 8y ago
    Fair enough, but you literally gave zero evidence for your claim that "Other countries, those with a somewhat decent social safety net, do not have such a big problem with homelessness". You should at least consider the possibility that what you said isn't really true and just fits your preconceived notion of a heartless US society versus a supposedly more social environment in Europe.
    - thomasz 8y ago
      Heartlessness isn’t a factor here. At least individually I’d say that people over here are way more indifferent towards the homeless. There is very little enthusiasm in terms of volunteering and such.
      - mter 8y ago
        Where is over here? The US leads the world in volunteering. https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO4.1-Participation-voluntary-work.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO4.1-Participation-voluntar... You can also look at BLS info: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/volun.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/volun.pdf Most cities have programs with volunteering with the homeless, just visit a nearby church and ask. Clothes, food and resumes are pretty popular things to help with.
        thomasz 8y ago

jMyles 8y ago

But you're ignoring a simple reality: people go to libraries because there is no other place to go. Why as a society have we decided that libraries are where hurting people are to be herded? That librarians are their outlet to be heard? We need more and richer commons, and particularly places that encourage healthy people to stay healthy and sick people to get well.

tomrod 8y ago
When did you decide that libraries are waystations for the wounded, as a member of society? I'm curious, because this underlies your notion. Personally, I see it in practical terms. Regarding the policy of using a library as a resource center, giving people access to computers and training materials is a pretty darn good idea for folks who want to enrich their careers or other domains of life.
crediblewitness 8y ago
The comment you are replying to answers your question. Q. Why as a society have we decided that libraries are where hurting people are to be herded? A. "...we find the idea of involuntarily committing psychiatric patients to be unpalatable these days..."
- tyingq 8y ago
  That's sort of right. It's not that we find it morally unacceptable to involuntarily commit people. It's that we don't want to pay for it. We shut down all the state mental hospitals. Which moved that population to jails, prisons, and the streets.
  - alejohausner 8y ago
    Taxpayers may have thought that mental asylums were expensive, but jails are very expensive. It's a lot cheaper to keep a schizophrenic in a state hospital. So I'm not sure that the decision to empty the state hospitals was driven by taxpayer stinginess. The whole thing is complicated. Drug companies in the 60s and 70s advertised their antipsychotics very hard. They persuaded the public that drugs could cure mental illness. That was a big force behind the emptying of the hospitals. Lots of short-sighted thinking.

truckerbill 8y ago

A lot of these people, I would wager the majority , had bad childhoods. Resulting from vicious cycles caused (in part) by poverty. I would also wager in a fairer parallel universe where this wasn't the case, a good number of these people wouldn't have grown up to be as mentally ill as they are.

jnbiche 8y ago
Schizophrenia -- responsible for much of the extreme behavior that librarians see -- is an organic disease that affects both the rich and poor at equal rates. It has nothing to do with how you were raised. It's true that wealthy families can afford much better care for their schizophrenic family members, but poverty certainly does not cause schizophrenia. Otherwise, I strongly agree with you that generational poverty is a critical societal problem to be solved.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >Schizophrenia -- responsible for much of the extreme behavior that librarians see -- is an organic disease that affects both the rich and poor at equal rates. A laundry-list of adverse life experiences associated with poverty are known to increase the risk of schizophrenia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181718/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181718/
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    correlation or causation?
    - gbear605 8y ago
      Of course that study can’t prove causation (not going to do a randomized trial on risk factors that cause schizophrenia), but they only looked at risk factors prior to onset, so that should be a good proxy.
  - jnbiche 8y ago

jdietrich 8y ago

>Since we find the idea of involuntarily committing psychiatric patients to be unpalatable these days We closed the asylums, because the long-term detention of the mentally ill is costly and inhumane. We can do better than just warehousing people in pseudo-prisons. We completely failed to provide adequate support in the community for people with severe and enduring mental illness, which is why so many people are trapped in a cycle of homelessness and incarceration. Most of these people aren't "incompatible with peaceful society", they just need help and can't get it. If any one factor is to blame, it's the systematic defunding of social work and community mental health. If your local library is full of mentally ill homeless people, the fundamental questions are why do these people have nowhere else to go? and why is nobody here who actually has the training to help these people?.

germinalphrase 8y ago
In complete agreement. Consider also the historical uniqueness of public libraries: if they didn't already exist in the fabric of civic life, would we really have the political ability to build them? We have little imagination or desire to build civic institutions any more; we only know how to build commercial ones.
- eru 8y ago
  It's not just civic institutions. Manhattan would be illegal to build these days in Manhattan. I'm glad that incapacity hasn't affected the whole world, yet. But it's seems to be spreading.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    >Manhattan would be illegal to build these days in Manhattan I don't really view that particularly to be a problem. Manhattan was already built in Manhattan, it doesn't need to be built there again. Now that it exists, it needs to be managed with the new problems that have arisen since the building of Manhattan. Problems change when you scale, things that were not a problem when you were growing are now a problem after you achieve massive success "Do things that don't scale" is great advice for a growing startup, and for a very good reason. Because once you get to Manhattan size, you have to start doing things that do scale. If Manhattan hadn't changed its building codes, it would be unlivable today.

JohnStrangeII 8y ago

The problem is that you don't offer any solution. Sure, some homeless people, schizophrenics, and sociopaths are unpleasant to deal with and will find themselves unwanted wherever they go, both due to their own actions and due to prejudices and fear. They go to libraries, house entrances, metro stations, and so on because they have no other places to go. Putting them out of your sight will not make the problem go away. The solutions are obvious and not mysterious at all. What do most of them need? Good social programs, free health care, job programs that work and are not just designed to "improve" statistics, personal mentoring, places to go where their few belongings are safe and they are not surrounded by criminals and troublemakers all the time, proper psychiatric care, drug help centres with medical professionals who are not allowed to cooperate with the police except in case of capital crimes, and so on and so on. What do they not need? Well, there are always hard cases and dangerous criminals can be mentally ill like anybody else, but generally speaking, as a rule of thumb, the last place you'd want to put them are US prisons, because the people who leave them are more likely to be mentally ill than the people who enter them. The quality of a society can be measured directly by how they deal with their outcasts and troublemakers.

gridlockd 8y ago
> The solutions are obvious and not mysterious at all. Good social programs, free health care, job programs that work and are not just designed to "improve" statistics, personal mentoring, places to go where their few belongings are safe and they are not surrounded by criminals and troublemakers all the time, proper psychiatric care, drug help centres with medical professionals... All these things exist in many developed countries, but they don't solve the problem either. Schizophrenic people in particular are unlikely to actually accept help. They're incapable of appropriately judging the reality around them. They can't tell if somebody is genuinely trying to help or if they're "out to get them". So you would have to force them into psychiatric care, but that's often not legally possible, and for good historic reasons.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >and for good historic reasons. Is it? I'm not convinced that we haven't over-inflated the harm of psychiatric institutions from 50s and 60s and 70s. I wonder if the spate of horror movies set in mental institutions are partly to blame in addition to over-focus on practices that have long been banned.

TulliusCicero 8y ago

I suspect free housing and other social safety nets would prevent people from deteriorating to this state, or at least mitigate the effects. I imagine other developed countries don't have this problem to this extent. What do Denmark or Japan do that we can learn from?

rayiner 8y ago
The US does pretty well in terms of homelessness rates (see link above—half the rate of Sweden). Japan’s is a lot lower, but Japan relies primarily on private charity to deal with homelessness. (Mental health issues are much more stigmatized than they are in the US. It’s relatively recently that Japan even started seriously studying the problems of homelessness at the government level.)
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  The US apparently has a much higher rate of unsheltered homeless people though. This is a quora answer, but there are sources at the bottom: https://www.quora.com/Is-homelessness-as-bad-in-Scandinavia-as-it-is-in-the-USA https://www.quora.com/Is-homelessness-as-bad-in-Scandinavia-...

mlrtime 8y ago

I've had this conversation with people in other countries when they ask why there are so many homeless in America. I ask them what their country does with mentally unstable homeless? They're response is they are not allowed to live on the street and they are "picked up". We can decide to let people have complete autonomy or they can be "picked up".

walterstucco 8y ago
Picked up means that they are taken freely to an hospital, they give them a bed, food, they check their conditions and can sleep there a night or two. At least in Italy, where my parents worked in hospitals and took care of many homeless or just troubled people. It's not like the Nazis taking prisoners to the camps...
apexalpha 8y ago
Mhh, in my country they're only picked up when its too cold to stay outside. Other than that we have many shelters where people can stay overnight for a euro or so.
- mlrtime 8y ago
  As there are in LA and NYC. Many people don't want to go for whatever reason so they stay on the street.

macspoofing 8y ago

>and in the extreme cases, institutionalization. Worse than that, the family and loved ones of the homeless individual have almost no rights to institutionalize them to get them the care they need. It is unbelievable that we're OK with it.

baby 8y ago

I don't buy the "incompatible with society" argument. It just sounds like an excuse not to help them. If you were in their shoes you would probably go crazy too. Just yestersay some spanish tourists were asking me why were there so many homeless people in SF. I told them "America".

stordoff 8y ago
> I told them "America". How w is this an A answer? It doesn't tell you anything about _Why_ there are so many homeless people.
- baby 8y ago
  American people will in general not fight for the man. They will fight against wellfare, healthcare, aids, etc

DanHulton 8y ago

While obviously some are mentally unstable, and that's what drives them to the streets, what's being ignored in this conversation is that being on the streets drives many to mental instability. Being homeless makes it difficult to find safely and sleep. Even a few days of that condition is extremely mentally taxing. Months or years? It's no surprise that so many of the homeless we see have mental issues. No surprise at all.

chongli 8y ago
Lots of people who are homeless aren't living it rough on the streets, they're couch surfing or sleeping in their car. It's generally the people with some sort of mental illness who end up in the streets, because they are too unstable to be tolerated anywhere else. I don't think there's any evidence to show that being homeless causes schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis. Depression and bitterness, sure, but likely not psychosis.
- DanHulton 8y ago
  The first thing I found when looking was references to this study: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/loose-link-from-mental-health-to-homeless/news-story/34ae40327635d240ef4e12cc7122c940 https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/loose-link-f... > Their results, released this week, reveal just over 30 per cent had a mental disorder. > "The figure was much lower than the community perception and what other researchers had put out there," Dr Johnson told AAP. > About 15 per cent had a mental illness before becoming homeless, while slightly more, 16 per cent, developed a disorder while on the street. Sure, one study in one city, but assuming it's roughly correct, roughly half (if not more) of the homeless with mental illnesses developed them after living on the street. So in addition to simply helping people not, you know, be homeless anymore, it would very likely reduce the amount of mental illnesses suffered by those who are and have been homeless.
  - chongli 8y ago
    Again, I think this author is equivocating on the word homeless. Most homeless are not the people yelling incoherent obscenities on the sidewalk. Additionally, with something like schizophrenia, a person can have the disease and under medical care be able to function at a high level. If, for some reason, they fall out of medical care and stop taking their medication, their symptoms can rapidly spiral out of control and lead to the sort of paranoid, potentially violent, homeless person described in the librarian article. This doesn't mean their mental illness was caused by homelessness, it just means homelessness enabled it to fully manifest itself.

AnthonyMouse 8y 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. That isn't really true. Even among those with mental illness, we can divide those into two groups, those whose illness isn't treatable using current methods and those who are. For the first case, "free healthcare" doesn't work, because they're incurable. The only real option for a violent person with an incurable mental illness is prison or something so similar to prison as makes no difference in practice. For the second case, free money does work, because when the problem is access to healthcare, money can be used to buy healthcare. (And when the problem is something else, money can be used to buy something else.) Particularly when you combine this with some kind of system for a homeless person to be evaluated by a doctor when referred by someone like this librarian. Because once they go to the doctor and get what they need in terms of medication, once they're on the medication they would have the wherewithal to use the money to continue taking the medication (and then ideally get into a state where they no longer have to live on the street).

thatfrenchguy 8y ago
For the first case, free healthcare does work because they get institutionalised even if they don't have money. If you have a decent system, those places are a million times better than prisons.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  We had state institutions at one point. They were basically prisons. Moreover, any kind of forced institutionalization is always "free" -- it's not as if you can get out of it for lack of money.

drb91 8y ago

I can’t imagine having so many mental issues I can’t get any benefit from shelter. Secondly, most mentally ill people are not violently psychotic, you asshole.

ficklepickle 8y ago

I'd have to politely disagree. Formerly being one of these "hopeless cases", and now being a productive, healthy member of society, I feel like I have some insight into the matter. Treatment, support and stability help immensely. We do none of that for the must vulnerable members of society. People don't end up like that overnight usually, it takes their mental health being neglected a long time. Often times the trauma starts in childhood. Can you blame them for that? A real issue is ignorance and the resulting lack of compassion. Everyone is insecure about something, but some people make themselves feel better by judging others. The fact of the matter is we are all a few bad strokes of luck away from squabbling in the gutter. Some egos are too fragile to admit that. Some unfortunate people may be unable to live in society, but they are in the minority and you don't know if they will respond to treatment until you try. I am astonished that you put drug dependence in the same category as just plain violent. Mental health issues aren't a moral failing, and treating them as such further ostracizes already marginalized people. Antisocial behavior arises when people feel rejected by society. Instead of blaming individuals from your position of privilege, perhaps you should consider the society and systems that created them. I hope you never find out just how thin the line is.