Hacker News Reader

Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

Wonder how they force the homeless who don't want the shelter. Maybe it's just cold enough that it doesn't happen much.

Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to compulsory measures, emphasizing the need for treatment of psychiatric patients over civil liberties concerns... Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy.

If at the end of the 3-month period it is considered likely that detention criteria are still fulfilled, new recommendations MII and MIII are filed and the renewed detention is then valid for 6 months. However, this second period of detention has to be immediately confirmed by a local administrative court.

That's one part of the solution; whether it works is left as an exercise to the reader ..

> Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy.

Wow, now that is something I have not heard at all despite how frequently I've heard about the Finland housing first approach to drug addiction/homelessness. Thank you for the reading topic!

EDIT: Where did you get these numbers and what kind of detention do they refer to? I am not finding this 214/100k number anywhere. The prisoner population in Finland seems to be about 50/100k and the pre-trial detention rate is similar (unlike where I live where pre-trial accounts for 80% of detainees due to slow courts)

EDIT 2: Nevermind, I did find psychiatric holds, which I see to be reported as 150/100k which is certainly much much higher than other countries.

Psychiatric hold is a very, very different category from prison.

This is enlightening. Thank you.

No one can force them to live in the housing they are provided. Well police might drop them off there. But can't nail the door shut.

They can and they do force them into mental institutions. In other countries the right of individual freedom is considered to be above the right of the government, so these people are homeless on the streets instead.

If you're concerned about abuses of this kind of arrangement, look for example to the Soviet Union, where a person who was against the government was of course mentally ill and put away – because how can you be against the wonderful government?

> They can and they do force them into mental institutions.

Okay, but this thread is about homeless housing.

The point is that this is a big piece of the puzzle of why “Housing First” does not seem to fully solve homelessness in other places that try it. Often people speculate that it’s because the policy is being applied incorrectly. But if there’s some people with mental illnesses that make it impossible to house them normally, and Finland helps them through an entirely different program, that could explain the gap.

Forcing someone into a mental institution means they are housed. Many (numbers wise, I have no idea what %) of the homeless in the US refuse all government help. In the US if you refuse help and have not committed a serious crime the government cannot force you to get help.

I have known a few paranoid schizophrenic people in my life. They needed help, but refused all attempts to get it to them. One eventually did get help - but only because he committed a felony and his condition was obvious enough that the court forced an insanity plea on him.

While the above sounds awful, it could be worse. The US used to have a lot of institutions and force people into them all the time. Abuse was common - it is debatable if freezing to death on the streets is worse than the institutions of old - most homeless don't freeze to death (though it happens). The right answer is reform the institutions, but I don't know how you do that.

How can you not understand?

Homeless who are mentally ill -> Forcefully put into institutions

Homeless who are drug addicts -> Forcefully put into institutions

Homeless who are criminals -> Forcefully put into jail or prison

How many homeless do you have left after that? The majority of homeless people in any place in the world has one or more of the above problems. Why would anybody be homeless if they didn't? Except for a short time during a crisis.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "they don't force them".

you mean like in the US’ west coast cities? favelas aren’t normal or a baseline for societal cooperation

Reply on news.ycombinator.com