>So, "Medical professionals should spend more time helping their patients."Assertive community treatment is about much more than conventional healthcare interventions. When delivered properly, it's an integrative and interdisciplinary approach that includes psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, social workers, occupational therapists and peer mentors. People with severe mental illness need medical care, but they also need good housing, support in maintaining that housing, meaningful daily activity and a network of social support. Most of that support can be provided by non-medical practitioners.
If someone is offered housing and doesn't want it, they are under no obligation to take it; they have the right to make choices about their own life, even if those choices don't seem rational. A lot of people genuinely do feel safer on the streets, which is in part a sad indictment of the standard of housing on offer to the very poorest.
If someone doesn't want to work with a mental health practitioner, send a social worker. If they won't talk to a social worker, send a peer mentor. If they don't want to work with anyone, train the local police in mental health crisis management so that they can provide positive interactions.
As is so often said in addiction treatment, you can't make someone want to get better. The idea that locking people up against their will consistently facilitates effective treatment is wishful thinking at best. Some people just need time, some need the right circumstances, some need a long and patient process of rapport-building.
Some people are just very difficult to treat, but that doesn't mean we should either abandon them to fate or lock them up indefinitely to keep them out of sight and out of mind. There are a whole spectrum of useful, evidence-based interventions, many of which don't particularly resemble what we might think of as psychiatric care. With a bit of imagination and sufficient funding, we can deliver good outcomes for people who seem to have intractable problems.