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California proposal would force unhoused people into treatment

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• serverlessmom 5y ago
  Americans will do anything to avoid providing people with housing.
  • pinewurst 5y ago
    The serious crazies won't go to housing.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • codezero 5y ago
      Those represent a very small fraction of the unhoused population.
      • viscanti 5y ago
        But probably the source of a large portion of the antisocial behavior that cities are trying to deal with (e.x. human feces in subway escalators that cause constant breakdowns in the escalators that aren't actually designed to be defecated into).
        • jjeaff 5y ago
          Is there something particularly attractive about an escalator to someone who needs to poop? Or is it just that there is so much pooping all over the place that some just ends up in the escalators?
          • viscanti 5y ago
            As one who rarely defecates in escalators in subways I'd only be speculating, but I would imagine that at night, when the subway is closed, they afford more privacy and protection from the elements than the street.
      • qqqwerty 5y ago
        But they are responsible for large portion of the quality of life issues impacting local residents. I feel like the homeless issue is a case of two sides talking past each other. Homeless advocates (and the "industry") are doing their best to support the "down on their luck" individuals. These folks are capable of holding down a job (maybe with some support), but might struggle to afford rent. The "homeless industry" is heavily focused on helping them. Meanwhile, local residents are complaining about the decline in quality of life from having individuals with drug and mental health issues living on their doorsteps. These types of homeless are very resistant to the services provided by the traditional "homeless industry". When you see a significant amount of tax revenue going to homeless services, but the guy living in a tent down the street is getting no help, it can be very frustrating. Hopefully this measure is the first step towards solving that issue.
      • urda 5y ago
        And yet they are causing the majority of issues.
  • cato_the_elder 5y ago
    > Americans will do anything to avoid providing people with housing. Including resorting to $60K per year tents. [1] But we could steelman the argument for proposals like this one: you could see homelessness as a problem of loneliness, addiction, mental health issues and unstable families. This might be more realistic compared to seeing it as merely a housing issue. [1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-want-15-million-for-tent-sites-16269998.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-w...
    • serverlessmom 5y ago
      The fact that governments spend money on tents and 'temporary solutions' doesn't disprove my assertion that we refuse to build safe and stable housing for all our citizens.
      • cato_the_elder 5y ago
        I kinda meant that as evidence for your assertion. Sorry if I wasn't clear on that.
        • serverlessmom 5y ago
          Ahhh gotcha gotcha. <3
  • 1270018080 5y ago
    If something even slightly threatens the capitalist dogma, it has to be reduced to a performative half measure. From healthcare, to housing, transportation... etc.
    • 0_____0 5y ago
      healthcare/housing/transportation are good for economic growth and "capitalists." the issue is more that the landowner/rentier class are still the most politically vocal, and anything that upsets the status quo for them gets an insane amount of pushback.
    • _haoa 5y ago
      There has been a rise in homelessness and people becoming disillusioned by the tethers of society, to the point that people are voluntarily retreating into cities and wildernesses to live freely off the land. Homelessness (particularly voluntary) is an existential threat to capitalism because it reduces the productivity of the working class. This in turn diminishes the gains of the proletariat, who need workers and purchasers of their goods and services (such as houses). The title story seems like a scary way for the system to force people into becoming productive members of society. In the system's eyes, these people are useless, unwanted wastes of space, so they are going to force them into treatment so they can "lead normal lives," a euphemism for turning them into productive cogs in the proletariat's capitalist machine.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    The east cost for the most part doesn't have these problems or at least not to the same extent (with a couple exceptions for Philly and NYC both of which are nowhere near as bad as cities in CA/OR/WA) This isn't an American problem. This isn't even a liberal/conservative problem. This is a west coast problem.
    • colinmhayes 5y ago
      The east coast is cold. The homeless leave. It's hard for me to blame west coast policy when it's really just the weather that's the difference.
      • 0_____0 5y ago
        Your theory entirely falls apart when you acknowledge that there are warm places in the country that don't have large homeless populations.
        • colinmhayes 5y ago
          Yes, homeless people want to live near wealthy people who don't mind being surrounded by the homeless. Most large cities in the US have this, but sunbelt ones typically are more conservative and therefore harsher on the homeless. There are of course many other reasons why homeless leave too. Harsh summers, car dominant culture are obvious ones.
        • Aloha 5y ago
          Yes, warm places, which in exchange for not having a brutal winter, have a brutal summer. It seems to me that all 'temperate' locations, do have a huge homeless issue, Summer in Texas is enough to drive the homeless away.
          • 0_____0 5y ago
            But that's simply not true. Much of the Southeast US is considered a temperate climate, and homelessness is not an acute problem like it is on the west coast. Miami, while humid, doesn't often get above the low 90s and has one of the lowest homeless-per-capita rates of cities in the US. The entire European Mediterranean region has similar weather to the Western US and doesn't have the same homelessness issue. Lake Tahoe, Chicago, NYC, Vancouver hit freezing in the winter and do have homelessness. I think it's easier to permit homelessness when people don't freeze to death or become heat casualties, but the causes are way more complex than the weather being nice year round.
  • DeWilde 5y ago
    Most homeless people in America are people who has some form of mental illness or have suffered from some traumatic event. In any case just giving them a home won't help much, those homes would quickly become drug dens. A better solution is to provide them with shelter, community, mental help, education, and generally good care. This is actually even harder to do than just throwing houses at them. But there is also merit to giving housing to people who are homeless but not mentally ill. Many European countries do this.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >those homes would quickly become drug dens. I don't see a problem with that. Sure it's trashy and sure I'd appreciate it if I didn't have to pay for it but a) the alternative is drugs on the sidewalk b) who am I to tell others how to live?
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        You have to consider destruction of the housing. You can't build a new million dollar home every 5 years for addicts.
      • hedora 5y ago
        OK, say you go crazy for some reason. You want me to drop you off in a drug den, and tell the hospitals to refuse to admit you if you seek treatment?
      • jimbob45 5y ago
        Remember that virtually every homeless individual started out as a homed individual. To inhabit a home, you need an income to pay rent, you need food, and you need utilities somehow for a bare minimum existence. If you're making the choice to spend your income on drugs rather than rent every month, you're going to quickly return to homelessness and we won't have solved your problem. If you're proposing giving people free rent, food, and utilities indefinitely, that starts to get uncomfortable as it edges toward slavery.
    • magicalist 5y ago
  • xeromal 5y ago
    There are often lots of housing options with strict drug control policies which prohibit many homeless for joining.
    • animal_spirits 5y ago
      Prevent is not the best word here, filter instead maybe? Some homeless refuse to join shelters because of these conditions
      • xeromal 5y ago
        You might be right. I struggled for a good word.
  • hodgesrm 5y ago
    You are incorrect. We don't provide mentally ill people with even basic treatment, most particularly in cases where they are too sick to recognize the need themselves. Instead, we walk around people on the sidewalk as they suffer psychotic breaks. I support this proposal 100%. It will not solve the housing crisis in California, because it's largely driven by high prices. But it will help us restore basic decency in our treatment of fellow citizens who badly need help.
• advisedwang 5y ago
  Article says that if they refuse, they are put into conservatorships. I suspect that's going to be the most common outcome of this system. Many homeless already have problems with banks, the criminal justice, healthcare system and other institutions. This is just going to add an extra institutional problem keeping them trapped in homelessness.
  • gamblor956 5y ago
    There are two types of homeless: (a) there are the temporarily homeless, who have lost their homes due to unaffordability (lost job, unforseen expenses, etc), may be fleeing domestic abuse (#1 reason for women with children), or some other temporary condition that prevents them from acquiring or maintaining housing; and (b) there are the permanently homeless, who have lost their jobs due to mental disease and/or drug use. (Note that the use of mind-altering substances causes physiological changes to the brain, so drug use frequently leads to mental disease.) Most of the (b) group chooses (to the extent they are able to exercise choice) to remain unhoused, because shelters and housing forbid narcotics, alcohol, and other contraband. Right now, we operate under the ridiculous presumption that members of the (b) group are capable of acting rationally and in their own best interests. This is objectively false, but since this is the presumption we are forced to pretend is true, we can't force them to into treatment, however bad they may need it, unless they are at risk of inflicting imminent physical harm to themselves or others (but in this context, physical harm doesn't mean any harm typically arising from drug use...) The proposal lets us force the members of the (b) group into treatment/rehab, however much they may refuse. And this is important, because people who are mentally ill will refuse treatment, until they get treated, at which point they recognize why they need to be treated, and will generally choose* to remain under treatment and to accept housing.
    • nybble41 5y ago
      There is at least one more category, (c) those who are temporarily or permanently homeless by choice. It's not common, but some do prefer the nomadic life and have no desire for a permanent address. We should take care not to assume that everyone in the "permanently homeless" category is there because of some sort of mental illness or drug addiction, forcing them into unwanted and unnecessary "treatment" until they agree to conform. Not wanting to be housed is not, in itself, a mental illness. IMHO the only thing that could potentially justify forcing someone to accept treatment (or confinement—their choice) would be if they are manifestly a danger to others. In other words, the current situation without this proposal, except no use of force is justified against those considered a danger only to themselves and not others.
• s1artibartfast 5y ago
  A much better solution is simply to enforce laws on the books and set up jails and prisons to do actual rehabilitation.
  • hedora 5y ago
    The current laws prohibit this. Also, that approach forces law abiding citizens to first earn a criminal record before obtaining medical care.
    • s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Laws don't prohibit this. Failure to enforce the laws and our broken prison system prohibits it. Yes, this approach would result in criminals receiving criminal records.
      • aerostable_slug 5y ago
        Laws do prohibit this. You can't force prisoners to take medication. I have worked in housing units filled with mentally ill inmates and as one might imagine it's not a therapeutic environment (though at least they are somewhat shielded from predation by the general population).
        • s1artibartfast 5y ago
          Yes, This is why we need prison reform to improve rehabilitation. I don't see how this parallel judicial system of "care courts" will be able to do anything that the existing judicial courts cant. Either approach will require rehabilitation centers that work, and the existing courts could send someone there just as easily as this new court.
  • gamblor956 5y ago
    Former public defender here: laws in CA already have rehabilitative programs. LA and San Bernardino County already have fairly large rehab programs for drug offenders (aka "diversion"). Diversion is actually the preferred process for first-time (non-dealing) drug offenders. However, repeat offenders are not entitled to diversion, and due to capacity constraints, must generally surrender their spot to first-time drug offenders (the best analogy I can think of is Disney's Lightning Lanes vs Standby Lines), because first-time offenders are more likely to benefit from diversion than a repeat offender for whom diversion clearly did not work. There are simply too many drug users for the rehab programs to handle. It's not a matter of just increasing the budget for rehab, because more than half of the drug-related offenders are repeat offenders who have already gone through rehab and relapsed.
• hedora 5y ago
  This is great news! A close friend tried to give his parents, wife, doctor and me (each individually) the legal ability to do this if he went off the rails. When he went off the rails, the authorities absolutely refused to do anything, even after he started talking about shooting up a local synagogue. We eventually got him care, but only after he was fired, divorced, homeless and went from $100,000s in savings to $100,000s in debt. (The spending was on non-medical things. He had health insurance at the beginning of this, but eventually stopped paying for it). The healthcare workers said this was pretty much the best case outcome because of current law.
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    It honestly sound like a weird scheme to provide free treatment the homeless, while sounding though. Still I question whether forcing treatment upon people is a good idea, and it would be much better to make it freely available before people become homeless.
    • steveylang 5y ago
      The correct answer is both are needed, for overlapping but not always identical reasons. There are a lot of drug addicts in homeless encampments, and they are often a menace to other people and to themselves (the drug addiction often going hand-in-hand with mental illness.)
  • s1artibartfast 5y ago
    How do you think this new law would prevent this situation?
• chaostheory 5y ago
  This is what will help end the homelessness problem. 80% of the chronically homeless suffer from mental issues and they need help.
  • gutitout 5y ago
    Drug induced psychosis.
  • jeffbee 5y ago
    Yes but ... In my county the census of homeless persons counted only 17% of chronically homeless who primarily attributed their situation to mental health. By comparison half of chronic homelessness was blamed on lack of money, i.e. the cost of housing. Treating their mental health conditions may not solve their overall problem. https://everyonehome.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019_HIRDReport_Alameda_FinalDraft_8.15.19.pdf https://everyonehome.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2019_HIR...
    • chaostheory 5y ago
      That’s just one county out of several in the Bay Area. Your study is also just a survey. There’s a good chance a mentally ill person will not consider themselves mentally ill. Nationally the percentage range from 60-80% of chronically homeless as mentally ill depending on the study.
      • jeffbee 5y ago
        That's consistent with the data here: 70% of them are mentally ill. But it's not considered the primary reason they are homeless. If you prefer to blame homelessness on mental illness, you need some kind of explanation for why homelessness has tripled in ten years, and why it's highly correlated with rents and anticorrelated with vacancy rates.
        • chaostheory 5y ago
          Because Reagan and the Kennedys made it so that you need direct consent from the mentally ill person for treatment. Otherwise, nothing can be done. Mental illness prevents many people from being able to hold down jobs and be independent when they are not getting needed treatment. You can't rely on the mentally ill to provide you with the real reason why they are homeless. That's a near useless survey. 80% of the homeless recover. It's mainly the mentally ill ones that stay chronic.
• dijonman2 5y ago
  I think this looks good on the surface but I can’t help but think about how it will end up burying the problem deeper. What if someone doesn’t want help? We shouldn’t be forcing anyone to do anything.
  • mulmen 5y ago
    > What if someone doesn’t want help? I don’t care. You can’t live in the park. That’s not a valid lifestyle choice. We should expand systems to prevent homelessness in the first place but once that point is reached “no thanks” is no longer an acceptable response to offers for help.
    • GeoAtreides 5y ago
      >That’s not a valid lifestyle choice. > that point is reached “no thanks” is no longer an acceptable response to offers for help. On this path lies a terrifying dystopia. For example, I find smoking and eating ultra-processed food an incredibly invalid lifestyle choice; doctors agree with me. Should we also mandate forced smoking addiction treatment and diet watching?
      • steveylang 5y ago
        We have laws prohibiting smoking indoors in public places. When your actions affect the lives of others, that's when they are subject to potential legal/judicial intervention. Certain segments of the homeless population have become a significant public safety issue in many parts of California, that is what is driving this. Leaving the extremely mentally ill/drug addicts to essentially rot and die on the street is not a solution for anyone. I'm not saying all homeless people fall into this category, but this is the segment that is driving this change.
      • mulmen 5y ago
        The terrifying dystopia is already here. Try walking or taking a bus from King Street Station to Third and Virginia in Seattle without seeing human excrement and tarp shelters. The area is completely unusable. Try eating a sandwich for lunch in Pioneer Square, or in Denny Park. That I don't feel safe traveling through my own city because it is overrun by mentally unstable people is unacceptable. Neither they nor I should live like this. We have rules and norms in a civilization. When we ignore real problems like mental health everyone suffers and those norms break down. I am not in favor of adjusting our norms to include "well you can't use public spaces because we don't care about mental health".
• zdragnar 5y ago
  Fear of being involuntarily institutionalized is the single biggest reason most of the homeless populations (around here at least) refuse to seek any assistance, despite institutionalization not really being a thing around here anymore. The voluntary aspect of this plan seems to be incredibly foolish to me, and I suspect it will not be accepted at high rates. Here's to hoping it helps anyway, even if I am not so hopeful myself.
  • aerostable_slug 5y ago
    Some of this fear may also be part of their illness. I have worked with incarcerated mentally ill people, and paranoia is (somewhat unsurprisingly) a symptom many ill people who have committed serious crimes suffer from. That said, I don't particularly want to be involuntarily committed either — it's a frightening thought, especially for those who have been involved in the justice system, where basically nobody cares about you as an individual. You'd want to have some kind of public awareness campaign so people (including potential patients) can see that they're not the asylums of years past. Play up the "spend the day playing checkers in the day room and getting better" part, play down the part where they don't get to leave until the nice people running the place decide enough progress has been made. Getting back to inmates, I spent some time reading feedback form entries about how various inmates felt about their new tablets. I took an excerpt from one and sent it to a couple of product managers — the guy had written up his test cases and findings so professionally they were sure it had come from one our our QA teams. I guess we know what he did on the outside... One of the more paranoid inmates ranted about how his tablet was watching him, tracking his movements, etc., but then complimented us on the selection of movies — I guess I know why he briefly overcame his paranoia and accepted the tablet (they're not mandatory).
    • nybble41 5y ago
      > You'd want to have some kind of public awareness campaign so people (including potential patients) can see that they're not the asylums of years past. Play up the "spend the day playing checkers in the day room and getting better" part, play down the part where they don't get to leave until the nice people running the place decide enough progress has been made. As long as the "don't get to leave" part remains true your "public awareness campaign" sounds a lot like propaganda to me. This sort of thing is why people don't trust the system. You need to be up front about the restrictions, and persuade people (especially the prospective patients) that it's worthwhile anyway.
• gwbas1c 5y ago
  > Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle that there was no more time to debate people’s civil rights when communities were faced with “people with their clothes off defecating and urinating in the middle of the streets, screaming and talking to themselves”. That's pretty much what I saw when I lived in, and traveled to CA. IMO: A major contributor to homelessness in CA is the absurd cost of living.
  • powerslacker 5y ago
    I'm with Newsom on this one. There's nothing compassionate about leaving the mentally ill in a pile of their own feces. If someone is competent enough to argue their rights to a court then that's one thing but the vast majority of homeless people in California are in desperate need of rehabilitation or care.
    • steveylang 5y ago
      Leaving them be is not helping anybody at all.
• calibas 5y ago
  This doesn't seem entirely fair. My right to refuse medical treatment now depends on my housing status? I live in California and I recently tried to help a friend get mental health treatment. We were refused because they were already at capacity and simply couldn't take on any more people. They even admitted she obviously needed help, but there was nothing they could do. The obvious solution is to increase funding for public mental health services so they actually have enough resources to help people in need. At the moment, people who want treatment can't even get it, so it's very confusing when the state seems to think forcing treatment upon homeless people and undermining fundamental human rights is some kind of "solution".
  • e40 5y ago
    I definitely worry about edge cases. This is the sort of law that seems ripe for unintended side effects/consequences. It doesn't seem hard to imagine someone living on the street/in their car in the Bay Area and not having housing, but having a job and feeling trapped. That trapped feeling makes them not quit the job or move to another area, for fear of being in a worse position. I worry there are more people in this type situation than we know. I wouldn't want people like this to be put into an institution.