This is appalling. What kind of morons are in this advocacy group? If you're going to talk him out of getting 'official' help the least you can do is help him yourself.
This is appalling. What kind of morons are in this advocacy group? If you're going to talk him out of getting 'official' help the least you can do is help him yourself.
I made two mental notes. One, if I ever got to that point again, not to fail, and two, if I did try, definitely not to call 911. They aren't your friends.
The movie depiction of gently waking up in a sunshine filled private hospital room with your family there waiting for you to support you after a failed suicide attempt could not possibly be further from the truth. You wake up in literal HELL ON EARTH and immediately wish you had succeeded and regret calling 911.
This is exactly the kind of progressive-libertarianism the article is arguing against. As if we should tolerate suicides to avoid infringing on the rights of the suicidal.
And of course emergency services aren't your friends. They're supposed to prevent you from harm not be nice to you. It would be lovely if they could do both but interacting with unwell, pyschotic, sometimes violent people takes a major toll. There aren't many people who can do those jobs without compartmentalizing their emotions.
Treating someone with mental illness effectively requires compassion. If being put on a psychiatric hold is a unnecessarily traumatic experience, you prevent some short term harm while causing long term damage. Not only do you add additional trauma that complicates recovery but you teach those in need of help to hide their suffering as long as possible.
> There aren't many people who can do those jobs without compartmentalizing their emotions.
So let's pay them well and not overwork them while holding to high standards for how they treat the vulnerable people in their care.
> This is exactly the kind of progressive-libertarianism the article is arguing against. As if we should tolerate suicides to avoid infringing on the rights of the suicidal.
Not only are you misconstruing the point of the comment you are replying to, your response lacks a single drop of empathy for those affected, including the commentor who shared a painful and personal experience.
Please try to practice more empathy, it might help you think of better solutions rather than just defending decades-old failed policies that created our current crisis.
Mush-brained calls for empathy are a dime a dozen and they lead to failed policies, in SF and elsewhere.
Nowhere did I demand perfection, only improvement. Refusing to even try to improve because perfection is impossible is irrational.
> It's just too much to ask of doctors, nurses, and orderlies to be compassionate all the time. These people are human beings.
That does not mean that we shouldn't find ways to improve the system to allow more compassion to be displayed. The hours and workloads we place on these workers are a significant contributing factor. We have a large problem with burnout, especially among our lower tier healthcare providers.
> Mush-brained calls for empathy are a dime a dozen and they lead to failed policies, in SF and elsewhere.
Name calling isn't a very effective communication strategy and won't hide the fact that your argument is based on falsehoods and misrepresentation.
The ”failed policies” are the ones that created our drug and homelessness crises over that last several decades. The war on drugs is a failed policy, busing homeless is a failed policy, jailing drug addicts is a failed policy.
That isn't to say that the new policies don't have problems and won't fail, but we need better options that just sticking with the failed policies that created the problem in the first place.
Yes, I mostly agree. Fear of being treated poorly by the EMTs and firemen is not a reason to avoid calling 911. Even many police departments have been doing a much better job about making sure that their officers have a better training and mindset for calls involving mental health crises. There are still enough horror stories about police responses that I would evaluate the track record of your local department when deciding whether to be afraid of them when considering making that 911 call.
> It was the mental health infrastructure that was abysmal, not the first responders.
This was indeed the intended thrust of my comment. I think fixing the remaining issues with police training and attitude is a much smaller and less important problem than figuring out how to revamp, operate and fund our mental health system more effectively.
This is where you demanded perfection.
Empathy and compassion are not the only values and the result of treating them as such is negative.
There is no call for perfection there. Stop pretending nuance doesn't exist. A system that helps 75% and harms 25% is better than a system that helps 25% and harms 75%. Improving the system so that compassion and empathy are a larger part of the process helps bring us closer to the former than the later for the reasons I explained. You ignored those reasons, and instead tried to attack a strawman... again. If you want to convey your arguments effectively, you need to try to understand what the person you are arguing with is saying rather than insisting they are saying what you want to argue against.
> Empathy and compassion are not the only values and the result of treating them as such is negative.
Another strawman. Nobody ever said they were the only values, just that they are important ones, especially when trying to treat mental illness.
Same type of morons which "advised" people to not get to the hospital to get treated for COVID because the doctors will kill them, harvest their organs and send them to the aliens.
This world is filled with idiots.
The activist is right. The man did not have to get into the ambulance. He did have the right to refuse treatment. That is literally his right. He gets the decision on whether or not to get treatment for his injuries. The man then exercised those rights. Now, he may not have exercised them in a way you agreed with, or even in a way that was beneficial, but it was still his choice.
And there's good reason why the homeless don't trust police and other emergency services.
The fact that the man died a few months later is almost inconsequential. But it's tied into the story to make it seem like a correlation. The man refused treatment, therefore he died (a few months later a block away).
Why do you say the activists were "persuading" the homeless man, but the EMTs were "offering" care.
In the story itself, it says the EMTs were actively treating him. Not offering to treat him, just straight to it. No mention of them even asking if it was ok to treat him.
In the story itself, it also says the activists just told the man his options. Nothing in that story indicates they tried to convince him of one option or the other, only that he had them.
You're the one doing a waltz here trying to add things to the story as presented.
People walking down the street bleeding need help not a decision to make.
As someone who has walked down a street bleeding before, please do not try to take that choice away from me.
I have a feeling some of this story is missing. It is being presented to support a specific narrative rather than examined to see what can be learned from it.
How bad was the cut? Why was the person resistant ro recieving care? Where responders pressuring a resistant person to accept care or did the activists convince a compliant person to resist?
Reality is complicated and the nuance matters in situations like these.
Your attitude mirrors one that the article is criticizing, I think correctly:
> What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin Walker—these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.
That is a strawman argument. I don't know anyone who believes in a ”fundmental flaw” in imposing interventiom. There are with imposing it and one of those risks is that your intervention is not actually helpful. Historically, many of these interventions have beem harmful and intended to prevent society from having to see the suffering rather than eliminating it.
The current state of our mental health system (especially the affordable options) is pretty abysmal. If you want support for more imposed mental helthy interventions, you need to work with us to improve treatment options and facilities. I think if treatment options were better, you would find that the need to impose them would diminish.
The temerity of those EMTs to treat a homeless man, probably mentally ill, bleeding in the street, without obtaining his consent! How dare they!
> The temerity of those EMTs to treat a homeless man, probably mentally ill, bleeding in the street, without obtaining his consent!
Obtaining consent is literally part of the job and those EMTs absolutely have been trained in how to do it and when they don't have to. The borders can be complicated and aren't always drawn correctly IMHO, but that doesn't mean that the requirement to obtain consent before treating someone should be removed.
You're assuming they hadn't already offered to treat him and he said yes which is the most likely scenario.
>> In the story itself, it also says the activists just told the man his options. Nothing in that story indicates they tried to convince him of one option or the other, only that he had them.
He's a vulnerable person and they were offering him a bad option. They make the good option (treatment) sound risky just by suggesting he doesn't have to accept it. They did absolutely no good in this case.
You are using language to color the situation in a way that the only possible solution is the one you want to present. When we don't actually know the details of the event, just what the author presented. Like you keep referring to him as "a vulnerable person". Why? Simply because he's injured? Maybe the wound is superficial. We don't know. All we know is that the author's friend called 911. And the man wound up refusing care.
Maybe there was no "good" option or "bad" option here, just options.
I think you're hanging on the part of the story where the man winds up dead. Because that's what the author wants you to do, associate his death with his refusal of care in this instance.
But his death occurred at a much later time in a different place. The two events are only related by happening to the same guy.
And not to mention, you want to rob this man of all of his agency. The implication from you is that the man was not capable of making a rational decision about his own care. Take away this man's housing situation and are you this adamant about forcing care upon him?
> You're assuming they hadn't already offered to treat him and he said yes which is the most likely scenario.
Complete conjecture and is not supported by the story at all. You don't get to imagine what likely happened, draw conclusions based on that imagined scenario, then declare your conclusions correct. We were told what we were told. I could say that the most likely scenario is that the wound was superficial which is why he refused aid.