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While there's truth to that, it's worth noting that most of those homeless people are suffering from ill mental health and/or substance dependence. You make it

• Cloudef 6y ago
  Those people are given help, but if they refuse that, there's nothing you can really do. People are only forced if they start being dangerous to other people.
  • Delk 6y ago
    I'm not saying you can necessarily do anything; in some cases you can't. I'm just saying that things might not be under those people's voluntary control and decision-making either once mental health issues or substance abuse problems go far enough.
  • wing-_-nuts 6y ago
    I'm not familiar with Finland but to those people have access to mental health services? In the US, a lot of folks who are addicted to drugs and alcohol are written off as moral failures when in reality, the drugs and alcohol are simply used to self medicate and numb the pain of their lives. I'm not saying there shouldn't be any accountability for addicts, but the fact that we completely write them off as a society says more about us than it does about them.
    • Cloudef 6y ago
      Yes, they have access to mental health services, and even rehabilitation services, but again only if you agree to it.
    • Delk 6y ago
      They do have access, at least in theory and to some of the services. But when people do become homeless in Finland, their problems usually run quite deep already, and they may just be quite difficult to help. I don't know if this is true but I've understood that in the U.S. homelessness might more often be a result of just financial downfall, while in Finland homelessness is very strongly connected to mental illness, substance dependence, or both [1]. Those people have pretty much lost control of having a normal life, or perhaps they never had one. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be helped, but it does mean helping them is likely to be an uphill battle. Drug addiction does get judged harshly by the society in general; alcohol abuse is likely to be swept under the rug unless it causes obvious problems e.g. at work, but if it does, it gets judged as well, although not quite as harshly as drug abuse. I'd expect most social workers and medical professionals who work with the homeless to know better than to see addiction as just a moral failure, though, so the problem may rather be that it's quite difficult to treat people who have a multitude of problems that run deep. Health care professionals might be wary of committing limited public resources in cases if they don't expect it to bear fruit, so the mental health services might be limited to emergency care and general assistance by social workers. I'm not intimately familiar with how those services work, though, so they might be more extensive than I think. [1] That is, at least among the native population; another visible group of homeless are poor immigrants living in the streets. They probably just wanted a better life in a richer country or something, and their reasons for vagrancy are probably different.
      • WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
        In the US, most circumstances resulting in homelessness are imminently solvable. However, there is little community will to address those circumstance and a great deal of political pressure against aiding vulnerable adults. To see strong examples political resistance, suggest moving folks in prison for low-level, mentally ill related crimes into in-patient facilities - redirecting per-person funding from prison budgets to pay for their care.
    • watwut 6y ago
      Some mental issues make you basically unwilling to accept that you have issues. And plus, we can't really fix mental health. It is not like everything would be curable.
  • teekert 6y ago
    It's pretty much the same in the Netherlands, given enough issues and after failing to get you back to work you basically land in a situation where the state pays for your existence though direct money and a lot of subsidies (ie when the stress of work cause a relapse in your drinking habits and it happened time and time again over the past 10 years). It is thus very difficult to understand why there are homeless people. But I once went (with work) on a trip with a homeless person (this is a charity, you pay and homeless people take you one trip and talk about their lives). And indeed the people on the streets always have psychological issues. Extreme ADHD, abused as a child, depression but just a little bit to afraid to die to really end it. If they want help it is there, always. Homeless shelters, places to get a postal address for free to apply for subsidies and minimal social income etc. But some just go crazy while waiting or go crazy while sleeping with other people in one room. Or they walk barefoot in the winter until their feet are so rotten that they can't walk anymore, too afraid to get help because they believe help means they will be abused again or mind altered or something strange. Most of them are constantly afraid and not a danger to others, more like very shy animals afraid of other humans, so they retreat and suffer while their fear of death keeps them alive, just barely. One woman we spoke to had her child murder her other child and she just started drinking. How can you help such a woman? So much pain.
    • GekkePrutser 6y ago
      Exactly, it's not a choice. Also, I think the current method of making alcohol really expensive through levies is not working. It only makes homeless addicted people poorer and more likely to turn to crime. The rest of us don't give a shit how much it costs, we don't use much of it anyway. The price is never a factor in getting addicted or getting off it. All it is is the government profiteering of people who can't help themselves.
      • Guthur 6y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK7l55ZOVIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK7l55ZOVIc But no one likes the alternative, which is to say there is no more alcohol, because it's just another human being saying you can't have more of this that you crave.
  • mewpmewp2 6y ago
    You could try to prevent people from reaching such state in the first place, for future occurrences.
    • pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      And still allow them the civil liberties expected in a democracy? I'm honestly not sure that's possible. Self-destruction seems almost like a human right.
  • justin66 6y ago
    > People are only forced if they start being dangerous to other people. I assume this isn't really true, and that the standard in Finland is that they're institutionalized if they're a danger to other people or themselves. The latter part is tricky, though. A person who is clearly in danger of killing themselves with a razor blade can be committed. A person who is in danger of drinking themselves to death on the sidewalk, perhaps not.
  • wsinks 6y ago
    For the record, welcome to San Francisco. (a joke, it's the similar here)
  • darth_avocado 6y ago
    > People are only forced if they start being dangerous to other people Really this definition needs to be more strict. In San Francisco, you could be drugged up, throw needles and broken alcohol bottles on the street, openly defecate, and this behavior is still considered not dangerous. A better way to deal with this is to allow people to reject welfare, but if they do, they still need to live as a decent member of the society. No littering, no public nuisance (shouting, spitting, harassing people), maintaining hygiene (no public urination/defecation, no risk of disease transmission etc.), no permanent encroachment of public property and so forth. Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others.
    • deadbunny 6y ago
      > A better way to deal with this is to allow people to reject welfare, but if they do, they still need to live as a decent member of the society. And if they refuse to "live as a decent member of society"?
      • throwawayboise 6y ago
        Then take them out of society. Same as any other person who persistently refuses to obey laws.
        • deadbunny 6y ago
          From the GP: > Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others. So given that is it better to try and help them reintegrate with society or do we just lock them up and forget about them? Or worse?
          • roenxi 6y ago
            There are people out there who, end of the day, are going to do things the people in charge don't like. There are 3 options: - Tolerate the behaviour - Remove their freedom - Kill them Even if the plan is to try to persuade them to behave differently, that still has to be done while either tolerating misbehaviour or removing their ability to misbehave. The line between tolerance and removing freedoms has to be drawn somewhere. This question of yours isn't helpful to the debate - the only way to push the conversation forward is to proactively say where you want the line drawn. All that this question will do is discover that the line is drawn arbitrarily and has uncomfortable edge cases. But that is a property of any legal boundary. Nobody has yet been able to draw a line that isn't arbitrary.