6 ms·

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 themselve

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 7y 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 7y 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.
- JohnStrangeII 7y ago
  > All these things exist in many developed countries, but they don't solve the problem either. You're just claiming this without providing any evidence and I believe this to be false (in tendency), unless by "solving the problem" you mean "perfectly solving all problem in each and every case". In general, adequate medical treatment and improved living conditions will improve the situation. With proper medication and treatment people can live with schizophrenia. As for putting people who pose no threat to the public or to themselves into closed institutions against their will, this is obviously immoral and not even worth discussing. At the meantime, every country I know of already as laws for mandatory closed therapy of people who actually pose threats. That includes the US. Overall, it's not clear to me what you were trying to say. Given that the obviously immoral solution is out of question, that there always remain some problem with the outliers for which the help doesn't work? Of course, these will always exist, just like there always will be criminals. But that's a truism.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > With proper medication and treatment people can live with schizophrenia. Am I supposed to just repeat myself? Schizophrenics refuse treatment a lot of the time. They can't tell you want to help them when they have paranoid delusions. Then what do you do? Unless they're provably a threat, you have to let them go their way, unmedicated. > Overall, it's not clear to me what you were trying to say. Given that the obviously immoral solution is out of question, that there always remain some problem with the outliers for which the help doesn't work? Your "obvious solutions" are not solutions. You make it sound like a solvable problem. It's not. It's really a tradeoff between public safety and personal freedoms. Mental illness is not an "outlier". About 30% of the homeless suffer from severe mental illness: https://web.archive.org/web/20121231000856/http://www.calpsych.org/publications/access/homelessness.html# https://web.archive.org/web/20121231000856/http://www.calpsy...
    - JohnStrangeII 7y ago
      30% is fairly low, and your suggestion that schizophrenics refuse treatment a lot is pointless. Some of them refuse it, other do not refuse it, and you help those who do not refuse it. The situation of homeless is not as bad in countries with better systems as it is in the US, precisely because, as a tendency, their situation can be improved and less is done in the US than in other countries. The effectiveness of social welfare programs, health care, and so on, is a purely empirical question that can be measured effectively. Contrary to popular belief, these are not questions of political opinion. (What is a matter of political opinion, of course, is how much you want to spent and who is going to pay for it.) You could e.g. start by helping the 70% of those homeless who, according to your own statistics, do not suffer from severe mental illness. That's already the vast majority. As for the remaining 30%, the suggestion you're trying to make, that they are all hopeless cases, is outright bizarre. We know that schizophrenia can be treated with medicaments and that not all of the people diagnosed with schizophrenia refuse treatment. You could start by treating those who want to be treated, for example. Finally, you still haven't bother to tell anyone what to do about the 30% you incorrectly portray as being untreatable, because they allegedly refuse treatment. If your suggestion is to put them into mental institutions against their will, even when they pose no threat to the public or themselves, then my reply is that you need to check your moral compass. This is prohibited by law and by very basic moral considerations. If you have another suggestion, rather than stating the obvious truism that not every schizophrenic can fully adapt to society or be treated effectively, then I'm all ears, and so are myriads of medical professionals and street workers. Right now, to me you merely come across as someone who doesn't really have anything to say about the topic. As I've said, it works better in many other countries, so your idea of not helping at all does not really seem to be very convincing to me.

gridlockd 7y 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 7y 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.
JohnStrangeII 7y ago
> All these things exist in many developed countries, but they don't solve the problem either. You're just claiming this without providing any evidence and I believe this to be false (in tendency), unless by "solving the problem" you mean "perfectly solving all problem in each and every case". In general, adequate medical treatment and improved living conditions will improve the situation. With proper medication and treatment people can live with schizophrenia. As for putting people who pose no threat to the public or to themselves into closed institutions against their will, this is obviously immoral and not even worth discussing. At the meantime, every country I know of already as laws for mandatory closed therapy of people who actually pose threats. That includes the US. Overall, it's not clear to me what you were trying to say. Given that the obviously immoral solution is out of question, that there always remain some problem with the outliers for which the help doesn't work? Of course, these will always exist, just like there always will be criminals. But that's a truism.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > With proper medication and treatment people can live with schizophrenia. Am I supposed to just repeat myself? Schizophrenics refuse treatment a lot of the time. They can't tell you want to help them when they have paranoid delusions. Then what do you do? Unless they're provably a threat, you have to let them go their way, unmedicated. > Overall, it's not clear to me what you were trying to say. Given that the obviously immoral solution is out of question, that there always remain some problem with the outliers for which the help doesn't work? Your "obvious solutions" are not solutions. You make it sound like a solvable problem. It's not. It's really a tradeoff between public safety and personal freedoms. Mental illness is not an "outlier". About 30% of the homeless suffer from severe mental illness: https://web.archive.org/web/20121231000856/http://www.calpsych.org/publications/access/homelessness.html# https://web.archive.org/web/20121231000856/http://www.calpsy...
  - JohnStrangeII 7y ago
    30% is fairly low, and your suggestion that schizophrenics refuse treatment a lot is pointless. Some of them refuse it, other do not refuse it, and you help those who do not refuse it. The situation of homeless is not as bad in countries with better systems as it is in the US, precisely because, as a tendency, their situation can be improved and less is done in the US than in other countries. The effectiveness of social welfare programs, health care, and so on, is a purely empirical question that can be measured effectively. Contrary to popular belief, these are not questions of political opinion. (What is a matter of political opinion, of course, is how much you want to spent and who is going to pay for it.) You could e.g. start by helping the 70% of those homeless who, according to your own statistics, do not suffer from severe mental illness. That's already the vast majority. As for the remaining 30%, the suggestion you're trying to make, that they are all hopeless cases, is outright bizarre. We know that schizophrenia can be treated with medicaments and that not all of the people diagnosed with schizophrenia refuse treatment. You could start by treating those who want to be treated, for example. Finally, you still haven't bother to tell anyone what to do about the 30% you incorrectly portray as being untreatable, because they allegedly refuse treatment. If your suggestion is to put them into mental institutions against their will, even when they pose no threat to the public or themselves, then my reply is that you need to check your moral compass. This is prohibited by law and by very basic moral considerations. If you have another suggestion, rather than stating the obvious truism that not every schizophrenic can fully adapt to society or be treated effectively, then I'm all ears, and so are myriads of medical professionals and street workers. Right now, to me you merely come across as someone who doesn't really have anything to say about the topic. As I've said, it works better in many other countries, so your idea of not helping at all does not really seem to be very convincing to me.