7 ms·
> 2) People are severely disabled by mental illness or addiction, and simply can't manage a household by themselves This is reduced a lot by early intervention
by silvestrov 3y ago
> 2) People are severely disabled by mental illness or addiction, and simply can't manage a household by themselves
This is reduced a lot by early intervention, i.e. always provide housing and always provide free healthcare.
It is so much easier to handle being "slightly mentally ill" when you can trust 100% that you will always have housing, healthcare and enough money for food, clothes and other necessities.
If you can do 90%, then government can provide you with last 10% by paying rent automatically and having a social worker visit once a week. This fixes problems early compared to you becoming homeless.
There is a lot of steps between "fully functional middle class person" and "mental institution".
- BbzzbB 3y agoLet's be real here, some people can't even do 10% let alone 90%. And than some people are severely mentally ill or addicted, not "slightly". I don't think GP is saying they're not doing a good job, but that "ending homelessness" sounds like a euphemism.
- silvestrov 3y agoIf you can "fix" 95% of people by providing housing, then handling the remaining 5% is much easier. These problems do not scale linearly. It is also surprising how much drug addicts and mentally ill can do when the basics has been taken care of.
- nonethewiser 3y agoFirst, it may not be 95 and 5 percent. Second, thats not whats asserted by “Finland ends homelessness.” The assertion is that homelessness doesn’t exist there. So it seems like these cases are unaccounted for.
- true_religion 3y agoI feel it’s like how employment statistics don’t include people not looking for work… if all the people who want housing get it, then homelessness has been eliminated. Someone who has a house but chooses not to live in it isn’t homeless.
- vorpalhex 3y agoI always encourage people who have this viewpoint to go and talk with your local homeless community. Bring some food and small bills with you as basically bribes and just talk with some folks. Ask them how they came to be homeless, what they do in their day, what they want to do. Give them your idea, ask them if they think it's a good idea.
- throw9away6 3y agoThe 5% - 10% is the bulk of the problem. The other 90% are living in cars or couches but aren’t causing wide spread damage
- ggm 3y agoFull employment is 3% unemployed. In Finland if you want off the streets it will happen in tractable time.
- jdietrich 3y agoThe key point is early intervention, particularly in adolescents and young adults. Severe mental illness doesn't suddenly emerge out of nowhere - there is an identifiable process through which people decline from "struggling" to "completely unable to function". We know that the longer mental health problems go untreated, the harder they are to treat. Likewise, the longer someone stays on the streets, the harder they become to re-integrate into society. Housing is only half the equation. For housing-first policies to work (and they can work very successfully), they need to be accompanied by comprehensive psychosocial support to address the issues that cause and perpetuate homelessness. That support is obviously expensive, but it works out much cheaper in the long run. America has an unusually severe homelessness problem. It is often presupposed that this problem is caused by factors which are unique to America and essentially intractable, which leads to proposed solutions like mass institutionalisation. I believe that this is fundamentally false; the key factor is a lack of political will to invest in the social infrastructure which prevents people from becoming homeless and prevents homelessness from becoming entrenched. This is ultimately a false economy, because the unavoidable costs of having a permanent dysfunctional underclass vastly outweigh the costs of proactively supporting people at the earliest opportunity. "Ending homelessness" in an absolute sense is a fantasy, but the vast majority of homelessness is avoidable.
- andsoitis 3y ago> America has an unusually severe homelessness problem. Maybe. Over 580,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness. That is a rate of ~0.18%, if my calculations are correct (600k / 332m). Contrast to Sweden (population 10m) which had an estimated 33,000 homeless people in 2020, yielding a rate of 0.33%. [1] Contrast to Japan, which has an estimated effective homelessness rate of 0%. So Sweden has a worse homelessness rate than the US but we all suck compared to Japan and Finland! 1. https://www.homelessworldcup.org/sweden#:~:text=Country%20st https://www.homelessworldcup.org/sweden#:~:text=Country%20st....
- dudeinjapan 3y agoJapan has homeless people. Not to the same degree as USA but they exist.
- coldtea 3y agoLet's be real here, if only those were the majority of the homeless in the US, and other such places. Instead, they are used as an excuse not to do anything for the homeless masses.
- sgregnt 3y agoFrom my experience, free Healthcare has extremely long wait lines, and bad quality of service, unless it is an urgent matter. I would guess if the mental illness is not severe, not an urget matter, it will not be treated well.
- silvestrov 3y agoThis feels like a political statement and not from knowledge of Finland. Finland: "The time within which you must get access to non-urgent care and treatment is laid down in law." source, which has list of waiting times: https://www.hel.fi/en/health-and-social-services/data-and-the-rights-of-the-client/waiting-times-and-customer-satisfaction https://www.hel.fi/en/health-and-social-services/data-and-th...
- FredPret 3y agoYou can’t legislate a waiting time! Laws act on people, not reality. What if it takes the doctors longer to work on the people in front of you? What if more urgent cases arrive and goes to the front of the line?
- tapland 3y agoYeah, for urgent care that can happen wether it's free or not.
- SgtBastard 3y agoI’d suggest reading the link the person you’re replying to posted.
- vidarh 3y agoYou can legislate it because it puts the government in breach of law if they don't provide sufficient funding to ensure sufficient excess capacity to meet the criteria. Governments legislate standards of care all the time.
- d0gbread 3y agoImagine this take on something like an enterprise SLA, that helps me reason about how at an individual level it feels nonsensical but at the parent level there are a bunch of upstream levers available to meet those SLAs.
- chongli 3y agoSome mental illnesses are naturally resistant to treatment. They lead to paranoia and mistrust. Attempts to treat sufferers are likely to fail, with the patient responding negatively and potentially viewing the doctor (or anyone else trying to help) as an adversary. You might respond that such folks be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. That step has become taboo in the U.S.
- nonethewiser 3y agoInvoluntary commitment to mental hospital has to be one of the tools. Its far better for everyone that the extreme cases be committed than left out on the streets.
- FpUser 3y agoOnly if person is violent and has caused actual harm and only through the court. North America has a history for putting people in jail / special treatment institution for fucking nothing. How about woman of improper moral character sounds.
- Barrin92 3y agoThe sketchy history of institutionalizing people shouldn't stand in the way of genuine medical treatment. Yes, putting women into counseling for 'hysteria' was ridiculous, but so is thinking someone with schizophrenia living on the streets has made a lifestyle choice. From the research I've seen the rate of severe, not mild, mental illness among the homeless population is estimated to be as high as one third. These are not people who are making choices in any sound state of mind, they actually need to be put in medical care, not because they're dangerous but for their own sake.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> The sketchy history of institutionalizing people shouldn't stand in the way of genuine medical treatment. It seems like it should in some way. For example, required ethics classes for the practitioners would limit who is allowed to apply such treatments. A bad history should at least prevent further bad history.
- lr4444lr 3y agoYou're suggesting that the government pay the rent for all 90% functional adults? How are you going to vet who qualifies for this? "Mild" mental illness when the incentive is totally free rent seems like an attractive proposition for to encourage a deluge of incredibly hard to falsify applicants.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kalleboo 3y agoWhat I'm hearing is "just implement UBI so we don't have to worry about fraud and waste time and money on administration"