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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 wr

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.

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.