There are some people who are homeless because they're poor, but in the vast majority of cases it seems that the primary problem has nothing to do with not having a home.
It's actually good that it is not so easy to declare people mentally ill, especially when they're not. Canada has a history of having it's 'social services' go completely out of control when given too much power, one nice example is the service that ostensibly protects children from abuse.
(But in fact is just as likely to do great damage to both children and their families).
I think many people would like to institutionalize the homeless just so the 'problem would go away', but homeless people are a symptom of a society that has issues, not just of those people.
For instance, banks and lawyers contribute to the number of homeless people by making it too easy to declare people bankrupt, seizing their possessions and means of generating income or their house, or to destroy someones life in divorce proceedings.
And then there are those that simply don't want to be part of the 'rat race' that have no other option but to become homeless (the Roma in Europe for instance). That used to be 'ok', but these days everything has to be owned by somebody so there is no way to be out of it all without trespassing.
It's not all clear cut. For sure there are mentally ill people that are homeless but I'd be highly surprised if that was the majority. For the most part they're just ordinary people down on their luck abandoned by friends and family. And plenty of them hit the bottle or drugs after becoming homeless, not before.
So a relatively small number of people are responsible for the majority of the costs attributed to all homeless people (in that case mostly for hospital treatments), they stay homeless because they can't get out or don't want to get out.
Those homeless people that are very motivated to stop being homeless will usually do so, those that are mentally ill or serious substance abusers have little to no chance.
Those that have 'adapted to life on the streets', I find it hard to find fault with them, they chose that path, the problem is with 'us', the ones that are not homeless because we see them as a problem, but they might disagree.
Being homeless is no picknick, but being in the rat race isn't either and some people might prefer the one over the other.
I absolutely do not want to institutionalize the homeless. I want to institutionalize the mentally ill.
For sure there are mentally ill people that are homeless but I'd be highly surprised if that was the majority. For the most part they're just ordinary people down on their luck abandoned by friends and family
You're right that the vast majority of people who become homeless are not mentally ill. However, the vast majority of people who stay homeless are mentally ill.
That's likely true but it is only a very small portion of the total. And many of those are still not mentally ill, just substance abusers (which has it's own long term effects on mentality, compounding the problem).
Drug addiction is a form of mental illness.
(Also, many long-term homeless drug addicts are "dual diagnosis", i.e., have some other mental illness as well.)
No it isn't. If I inject you with heroin for a couple of weeks steady that makes you a drug addict, but not mentally ill.
But I think we may have to agree to disagree here.
The one is a mental problem, the other has to do with the brain in a very specific biochemical sense.
I think that for the most part there is plenty of overlap between the two in terms of the people that are afflicted but there is a direct biochemical reason behind being addicted to any drug that is not directly related to mental illness.
> The definition of a disease for me would be 'an abnormal physiological process brought on by a relationship between the genetics of the individual and the environment. That path of physiology would create a set of signs and symptoms that progress in a predictable way that we would call a 'natural history' and by affecting the natural history we create a predictable response to treatment [...] and addiction does fit that, but people get hung up on where the physiology goes wrong. They don't understand that it's a brain disease.
Institutionalize is a nice, clinical sounding word, but what it means is incarcerate. Imprison.
You are talking about locking up people without them committing any crime, without any trial, without them having any appeal or defense, for a week, or a year, or their entire life.
You, I suspect, would condemn a police authority who wanted to imprison whoever it liked, for however long it liked, on grounds of serving the general good. It is just as wrong to give a medical authority those powers and declare they'll only be used to help the people they're imprisoning.
And, I don't know what institutions you are referring to, but Riverview (one of the mental health institutions) had a Bus Stop in it. Crazy people were always getting on board - It's true that people who posed a threat to themselves or others, or were in for evaluation to determine if that were the case had their ability to leave restricted - but I don't think "Institution" and "Prison" are synonymous.
Not at all. In Canada, at least, people in psychiatric institutions have ample opportunity to challenge their detention. Their cases are reviewed and they are considered for release far more often than those who are convicted of crimes are.
I don't know about Canada, past or present.
If you mismanage your finances, really the worst you need to worry about is losing some of your stuff (which you probably couldn't afford anyway). If you make more than the median income in your state, you might need to enter a payment plan rather than having your debts wiped away.
The tax man or your ex wife can ruin your life with debts that can't be wiped away. The bank, not so much.
[1] The judge needs to decide that you can continue paying the mortgage, which might not happen if mortgage/month > income/month. Further, there is a value above which this no longer applies - rich people may lose their estate or the Bentley.
Having seen a contractor go bankrupt, his house, car and his work tools sold to the highest bidder and the money split evenly between the tax man (the rest of his stuff) and the bank (his house and vehicle) very recently says there is at least one situation where you were simply dead wrong.
There is voluntary bankruptcy, and involuntary bankruptcy, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy it is not fair to suggest all bankruptcies are voluntary.
I suppose under the circumstances you describe, you are correct: a person may lose their job if the corporation they work for goes bankrupt involuntarily. On the other hand, corporate bankruptcy can't touch a person's house/car, unless perhaps that person bet all their personal positions on the success of a corporation.
So I suppose an involuntary corporate bankruptcy may cause the personal bankruptcy of an entrepreneur. I'm still not sure how this rather unusual situation would contribute significantly to the number of homeless.
Self employed people are private individuals and are with some regularity pushed in to being homeless, either alone or with their families if they have them due to economic downturns.
There now is some nice legislation on the books that will make it impossible to escape credit card debt when you file for voluntary bankruptcy (chapter 7), and it is also much harder to file for that than it was in the past.
Typically an individual that has been declared bankrupt can be evicted from rental property as well because of debt incurred after the stay due to the filing for bankruptcy.
So even on rented property there is no guarantee that filing for personal bankruptcy will protect you from being homeless.
The state doesn't want to pay for keeping him in a healthy environment - that's expensive and Indiana doesn't like public expenses. His family apparently couldn't afford it, and arguably that sort of lottery is unfair, deciding that some families get to go without the expense of crazy relatives while others get the short straw.
After the bank foreclosed on the property, he was living in a truck for a while. I don't know what's become of him now.
So tell me again that it's good that people can't be declared mentally ill. There are people who really are mentally ill, and dodging society's duty by saying they're better off dying free is not the answer.
I might go as far as proposing that studying psychology is as humbling experience as studying cosmology and astronomy.
One mental condition that really fascinates me is schizophrenia as you begin to understand reality is the brain's way of interpreting chemical, visual, auditory, tactile and other external stimuli, but also via its internal chemical reactions, neural connections that can go haywire.
Cognitive dissonance is another topic I'm fascinated by and wish everyone would know about it.
Anyway, if your interested in these subjects, but don't want to read very technical papers, I recommend reading Jonah Lehrer as he'll point you in some interesting directions: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex
Currently we are reading Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens" (really enjoying it so far, very dense.)
You can read Lehrer's unofficial reddit interview here (The OP, subtextual, is a professional Neuropsychologist):
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d1pib/jonah_lehrer_aut...
You can read my thoughts on his interview and his book on the comment's section. Same username.
I am a fan of dry, no-nonsense, non-fiction books. So I don't think its very surprising that I often don't enjoy pop-psych books because they tend to dumb down the science and use selective knowledge to get readers hooked into the topic. Hard science is rarely a priority in those kind of books, its the personal narrative and interpretation they want to push that takes precedence over actual science.
This is why I often read books thats written by people who have good background knowledge on the topic and is a professional on that field. Which means I try to avoid books written by General "sciency" guy who has an interest in many things and read some books on those things and he is just rehashing and reinterpreting those words the way he likes it to sell as many books as he can.
I am fairly new to Neuro/psych books. So I don't have an extensive list of books I have already read. However I do have a fairly good list of books on my queue that I have collected over the last few weeks from other professionals neuropsychologists on the field.
- Anything by Antonio Damasio (just started reading "The Feeling of What Happens", loving it.)
- Books by Daniel Dennett
- Books by Joseph Ledoux
- Books by Oliver Sacks
- Subcortical Structure and Cognition (needs some neurology background, I have none. I am slowly building myself up to reading it)
- The Neuroscience of Religious Experience
- Phantoms of the Brain
Note that all the books or authors I have recommended are either psychologists or neuropsychologists by profession (AFAIK), unlike Lehrer, who is a science journalist with interest in psychology. When you read a hardcore no-nonsense Neuropsychology book (ie, Damasio) and then compare it to lehrer, I think you will see the glaring difference in knowledge and substance.
Edit: I see a few suggestions from you in other parts of this thread. Any others?
For articles and research paper:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Neuropsychology/
http://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/
For any specific articles I would recommend I will have to go through my huge list of saved links. I am a bit lazy right now, I might come back to this later and post some. :)
> (Damn you, deinstitutionalization.)
I would agree with you if those places didn't end up being worse than prisons... ("No one will believe the crazy girl when she says that I raped her!", etc)
[edit] In general, Canada seems to have better support for mental health issues than the US does.
Thing is, the streets are worse than (Canadian) prisons, too. It's not unheard-of for homeless people to ask judges to please send them to jail.
But more significantly: We need to fix mental health institutions. Saying "making functional mental health institutions is hard, let's go ride bikes" is fundamentally failing in our obligations to the mentally ill.
There seem to be only two versions of this, one that leaves people without incentive to go back to work (the European model) and another that says 'you're on your own' tough luck.
Another thing that jumped out at me in these stories was the lady that had daughters but was living on the street anyway. If my mom were about to be homeless she'd be living here, not on the street and I'm sure my brother and sister would think about it just the same.
Canada's welfare system is just fine, actually. The "Jason" in the article is a good example of how it works -- shortly after becoming homeless, he talked to the welfare office, he found an apartment which rented for the standard welfare rate, and if he hasn't already moved in, he almost certainly will within the next week. The vast majority of instances of homelessness are resolved quickly in exactly this manner.
Why doesn't this happen for the small minority who end up being long-term homeless? To a very large extent, it comes down to one thing: Mentally ill people aren't very good at doing paperwork. People who are addicted to drugs or are schizophrenic aren't very likely to accomplish the steps Jason went through to get welfare-funded housing.
There's a fairly simple algorithm to ending up in jail: commit a crime and get caught for it. I wonder why you don't see more of that if homeless people are so desperate for shelter. (Though if they're mentally ill, that might explain why it doesn't occur to them, or why they're not terribly effective at making and implementing effective plans.)
For minor crimes, that's ineffective: You'll be arrested, charged, and released back onto the streets with an order to turn up in court at a later date.
As for why such people don't commit more serious crimes -- homeless people aren't (necessarily) psychopaths. Wanting to have a warm place to sleep and decent meals doesn't mean that they'll go out and kill someone just to get themselves arrested.
So yes, it happens, and yes, it is far more expensive than simply providing the necessary social services to begin with.