Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This group is mostly made of the mentally ill, drug addicts, or most likely an individual suffering from both problems.

I'm the author of the piece. I was homeless with my adult sons for nearly six years. None of us has a mental health diagnosis and none of us does drugs or drinks. We are all tea-totallers.

I'm really tired of the "junkies and crazies" meme about homelessness. I don't think it's accurate. It's just another way we throw our hands up and claim "It can't be solved, and not because I don't care."

I think we need to solve our health care issues in the US. Medical issues contribute to chronic homelessness.

I think other special needs, such as being ADHD, contribute. ADHD isn't a mental health diagnosis of the "he's just insane and can't be made to behave" variety. But such issues do create inherent challenges to regular employment.

I have inherent challenges to regular employment. I began doing freelance writing online while homeless and that helped me get back into housing eventually.

My blogging mostly doesn't pay my bills. I occasionally get tips and I have a little Patreon support, but I've been told for years "Get a real job. Writing just doesn't pay, you slacker you." and it's like "Writing is something I can do without it creating high medical bills and making me unable to work at all. I do it well enough to sometimes hit the front page of Hacker News. Why the hell shouldn't this be a means to support myself?"

And I think some portion of it is I'm a woman and I'm poor and those are contributing factors. People don't want to admit sexism and classism influence which websites they are willing to support financially.

But, regardless of all that crazy making stuff, doing what I could do helped me improve things:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-twist-on-...

Anyway, it's probably time for me to walk away and not reply to too much stuff here. A lot of it will likely end up being personally offensive to me, but I didn't want to just let this remark pass without some push back. I'm so tired of the "junkies and crazies" meme. The data I'm familiar with says it's not true.

I worked in HMIS for years and the chronic homeless are almost ALWAYS "mentally ill, drug addicts, or most likely an individual suffering from both problems." Additionally, you make a choice to support yourself however you want but "Why the hell shouldn't this be a means to support myself?" is nothing more than entitlement and wishful thinking. There are a bunch of other things that I do that make money, make sense for me, but dont pay the bills, so I adult and find work that does support me.

I’ve worked enough EDs that this strikes me as quite true (about drugs and mental dx), but it’s not clear which way causality runs. Homelessness is not a condition in any way conducive to maintaining mental health. I’d be hard pressed to intentionally design something more effective at damaging the psyche.

I agree with the entitlement comment as well. “Doing this thing works for me” is not the same as “doing this thing is valuable to anyone else”.

When I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy, the professor said something like "I'd drink too if I were homeless. The sidewalk is cold and hard."

While I appreciate you bringing up that element, I actually think it's more complicated than that. In a nutshell, I think addiction generally arises out of other problems, a la the phrase "driven to drink." Blaming everything on "You drink" fails to address the underlying problems concerning why you drink.

But I don't think elaborating at length while being described as having an entitled attitude because I think I should be able to get compensation for work I can do that other people clearly do value to some degree is likely to be constructive.

> people clearly do value

There's a difference in valuing something 10$ vs under 1¢. 100 of one can feed a person for a month, and a 100 of the other can buy you a single gum.

How did you meet those individuals? Have you considered that the mentally ill and drug addicts are more likely to require medical assistance, hence skewing your perception?

Like you, I’ve also been homeless myself in the past. I’m in the 80%. Using a combination of public and private help, I was able to pull myself out of homelessness after several months. I was eventually able to graduate with a degree, enabling me to become a software engineer. My experience matches the research. I’ve also volunteered at soup kitchens for a while. That personal experience also matches the research concerning the chronically homeless.

Perception and reality don't always align and our existing point of view shapes our perception.

While homeless, I was throwing up my lunch one day in the bushes because of my medical condition and someone driving past in a car yelled out their window "Drink too much last night?" taking glee in what they were all too happy to assume was evidence that their prejudice against the homeless and hatred of them was justified.

I will also note that I'm quite nonplussed by the people showing up here to insist in writing in public that they were part of "the good homeless," the deserving homeless, the folks in need of a small break and not like those people.

My father was mixed race and routinely told racist jokes. I've recently realized he probably looked a lot more mixed race than I understood growing up because of photos I've seen of a full-blooded Native that bear an uncanny resemblance to my father. So I strongly suspect that my father told racist jokes to implicitly signal he was white and "not one of them" in a racist world that does terrible, horrible things to non-whites on a routine basis.

To me, that reads as an expression of fear and an act of self preservation in an ugly, hostile classist world. But it's an act of self preservation that preserves the status quo.

I blog to try to present the data and point of view I'm aware of that conflicts with the accepted narrative that I believe keeps these problems entrenched.

Perhaps it won't make any difference. But perhaps it will.

Research data tends to trump personal anecdotes, both yours and mine included. Several separate studies on the homeless have consensus.

I did not say I was part of the “good homeless”. What I said was that the vast majority of the homeless aren’t chronically homeless and I was part of that non-chronic population. I’m also saying that for the chronically homeless, homelessness is just the symptom of the underlying problem of mental illness. This is another way of saying, “they didn’t get the right kind of help that they needed”. When people still can’t be high functioning with all the social safety nets available, we have to re-examine the strategy that isn’t working for them. I don’t feel the half measures you’ve described is enough for the mentally ill

We’ve had this discussion before months ago. We can just agree to disagree.

Studies get created by people with their own biases. Historically, IQ tests were used to insist that people of color were inferior to whites, not because it's true but because it served the agenda of racist whites.

Social phenomenon are inherently hard to study in some kind of objective fashion. People will give the answers they know are expected of them in a world that is openly and unapologetically hostile to them.

"How to lie with statistics" is one of my favorite works. Two people with different points of view can look at the exact same data and reach completely different conclusions about what the data means.

Humans are incredibly prone to confirmation bias. Humans look for the data that supports their existing world view and hand wave off data that conflicts with it. This is a very well known phenomenon.

Edit in response to your edit:

We’ve had this discussion before months ago. We can just agree to disagree.

Sure. I don't recall discussing it with before and I didn't start this discussion. You did. You chose to reply to something I said here, knowing we've discussed it before and we don't agree.

So calls to "agree to disagree" sound a bit like I should just shut up and let you have the last word.

I'm not rebutting every single comment in the discussion of the article I wrote. If you didn't want to actually talk to me in specific, you absolutely didn't have to.

Let’s be very clear here since you like making insinuations for my comments. All I am saying is homelessness isn’t the real problem for the chronically homeless. It’s only a symptom. Consequently, society isn’t helping the chronically homeless ie the mentally ill effectively. I’m just saying society needs to drastically change their strategy of help by including more medical professionals and institutions into the mix.

It’s hard to lie with data when mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are involved. Many of these people were discharged from institutions for financial reasons, which adds further credibility for the studies’ conclusions ie these people needed special medical help and society just kicked them out into the streets

At no point did I call the chronically homeless “bad” which really angers me when you accused me of it.

Your personal anecdotes are always interesting but they don’t give people the big picture

Let’s be very clear here since you like making insinuations for my comments.

I wasn't making insinuations. I generally do my damnedest to try to phrase things as neutrally as possible and make sure, to the best of my ability, that I'm not making insinuations.

You aren't required to engage me. If you don't like engaging me, then don't. You don't have to.

You can just let your original comment stand on its own. Nothing I say erases anything you say.

Readers here are generally intelligent people who can draw their own conclusions and can see that "These two people seriously don't agree."

There's zero need to formally state that while continuing to engage.

That's not an insinuation. It's a description of online social dynamics that isn't readily and immediately apparent to a lot of people because it runs counter to how in-person conversation works. (That includes me. It took me eons to figure that out.)

This will be my last comment in reply to you. If you feel the need to reply further, that's up to you. I'm absolutely not looking to have some pointless fight.

You’re being disingenuous. Your insinuation was that I was trashing the chronically homeless. If you re-read your comments you clearly say that my comments were alluding to the “bad” homeless which is totally false. You don’t need to insult people you disagree with especially on HN.

I need to engage your ideas because I do not feel they provide HN the larger picture on homelessness. Chronic homelessness is a mental health issue and not a primarily a housing issue

Reply on news.ycombinator.com