Seems like they are over complicating it…
“Evan’s younger brother had experienced some serious mental health issues and he was awaiting news of a diagnosis.”
“his mother was a schizophrenic and a heroin addict who often paid for her drug habit with sex. They were homeless, moving constantly. Often she would head off for days at a time, leaving Evan with friends or relatives, or sometimes on his own, without food. When he was 11, she took her own life”
“Evan’s father began to suffer with mental health issues. By the time the pandemic arrived, he was in full crisis, using drugs and worried enough about Covid that he had locked himself inside his house. For a week, Evan stayed with him, and they shuttled back and forth to hospital as his father experienced mounting phobias and suicidal thoughts, but refused treatment. At the end of that week, his father took his own life.”
Dude literally had the deck stacked against him.
“The real problem came when Evan inherited his share of his father’s estate – $170,000. He used some of the money to rent an apartment. “But I had extreme schizophrenia and I just filled it with trash because I was so out of my mind,” he says. “I was seeing faces dripping down the walls, I couldn’t even be in there.””
And this, kids, is why the “Housing First” model won’t work. Mental Health and addiction treatment have to come first THEN housing.
And why do you think them not being homeless somehow excludes the option of mental health care?
It doesn’t here. Where we actually use this policy.
Because right now, Housing First doesn’t demand treatment. That’s why it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t even demand you fill prescribed medication and take it on schedule, hell, it doesn’t even require you get evaluated for prescribed medication.
So you get stories like the above, a housed undiagnosed mental patient filling their home with garbage and living in terror from things that aren’t there.
You’ll get those no matter what, until you manage to cure ALL undiagnosed mental illness. And undiagnosed mental illness is by definition undiagnosed.
Without “housing first” (again, a bullshit name) you’d have those people living on the street. You may not understand this, clearly living a sheltered life and having little to no actual experience on the matter, but homeless crazy people are a lot more dangerous than crazy people who get to go crazy in an apartment.
Oh no, did an undiagnosed mental illness result in an apartment that will take two men at least an hour and a half to fix? Oh no, that’s acceptable, clearly we should not house people at all and toss everyone on the street to get even sicker and literally die.
“Housing first” is preventative. Living on the street creates mental illness, and a person NOT being homeless does NOT prevent them from getting mental health care. The main point of my last comment, nay, all my comments. Yet you can’t answer it.
The fix for this is super simple, you get people healthy BEFORE getting them into housing.
You collect up all the homeless people and evaluate them.
Folks with mental illness are diverted to treatment.
Folks with addiction issues are diverted to treatment.
Folks with outstanding warrants are sent to corrections.
NOW…
Once people successfully complete treatment or have served their prison time, there needs to be a re-integration system, this applies also to homeless people who aren’t part of 2-4.
There needs to be specialists here specifically to help people with criminal records.
As in step 5, there needs to be housing specialists just for people with criminal records.
If you put housing first, with no requirements for mental health or addiction services, it fails. Over and over and over again, it fails.
We have housing first in Finland and literally no-one lives on the streets. In tve US, they create new mental illness every day because they have to live on the streets which are covered in human shit.
You do not understand psychiatry or social policies and you shouldn’t pretend to. You’re some sort of sheltered liberalist who doesn’t get heard in real life so you have to do… this.
I’m a billionaire, I’m a billionaire, I’m a billionaire.
…
Wait… just saying things doesn’t make them true? Huh. Well that’s a surprise for both of us, isn’t it?
Seeing how we literally don’t have anyone living on the street in my country. What country are you from and why do you keep avoiding my question of why do you think NOT being homeless prevents people from getting mental health care?
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-international-philanthropic-071123.html
Finland also has universal health care which the United States does not have. You guarantee people will get the mental and physical health treatment they need, the US refuses to do that.
And again, refusing to answer how you think not being homeless prevents people from mental health care.
If you can’t pay for housing, you can’t pay for health care, mental or otherwise and in the US, that’s the barrier to entry.
The US not having social security doesn’t mean housing first is a bad policy.
Do you think there’s no professional managing the case? That they just give them keys, a pat on the back, and proclaim “Figure it out!” It’s naive to think either solution is a magic bullet, but one approach has statistically better outcomes.
That’s EXACTLY the problem with Housing First. Legally they are prevented from placing restrictions on the housing.
So they can’t demand residents enter treatment, remain sober, take their meds or even obtain proper meds.
It’s housing without restrictions and that plainly does not work if the people you are housing have severe mental illness and addiction issues.
You seem to not know what Housing First is. From the 2007 HUD report “The Applicability of Housing First Models to Homeless Persons with Serious Mental Illness”
And you also have a single image that people get better only through resident treatment. As the paragraph before that states, it’s not well understood:
Again, you could try reading the sources already provided and quoted above. Here, I’ll bold the important part just for you:
“Housing First forbids requiring beneficiaries, as a condition of receiving assistance, to attend drug rehabilitation programs, look for work, or even take their mental health medicines as directed by a doctor. They can accept services that might be—and often are—offered, but they are under no enforceable obligation to do so. If they take drugs, refuse work, or even are charged with crimes, housing is still available to them.”
Under a housing first model, they legally cannot require prospective residents enter treatment as a condition of housing.
That’s literally the definition of “Housing First” and why it’s doomed to failure.
They can’t turn away someone who is in treatment, which is great, but they can’t demand someone enter treatment, which is the failure point.
If addicts are given a choice without consequence, they will choose to feed the addiction, they won’t seek treatment. That’s the nature of addiction. They aren’t going to make the right choice of their own volition.
Oregon saw this with the utter failure of Measure 110… Let’s legalize drugs, if someone gets caught with drugs, we’ll give them a choice:
16,000 people ticketed. Care to guess how many people chose option #2?
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/politics/measure-110-secretary-of-state-audit-drug-decriminalization/283-a6fe5145-42ee-4007-8d19-fc92683436d3
"The agency did get the hotline set up, but had only received 119 calls related to the drug treatment program as of June 2022, at an estimated cost to the program of more than $7,000 per call.
Of those calls, only 27 people were interested in drug treatment resources."
It boggles my mind how you manage to dance around every request for science backed evidence focusing only on your preconceived notions. When you weirdly in the most internet way say I won’t read the scientific article cited in the conservative think tank whose only purpose is to skewer housing first and misrepresent it’s working. I read it and note that that they misuse the findings of the journal. Silence.
I ask for scientific studies to support your view. There is now several decades of systematic research to support it’s role in addressing the homelessness crisis. Why? Is it just because you don’t want to read a view that may complicate your prescription? Do you not feel comfortable reading scientific articles? What is going on?
Your definition never mentions the role of case worker in developing goals and creating buy in for compliance. Patience, even highly motivated ones, regularly lapse in compliance. Life changing transformations are not easy.
I provided a quote that we don’t have understanding why people get clean. It’s not because we force them, that’s for sure.
Why do you now bring up 110? Does this have anything to do with Housing First? Or is it part of so opus that addicts are bad children who need to be forced to do what’s good for them?
I don’t think we’re going to meet in a space of mutual understanding. I think your presumptions that there people get clean only if you force them. You just keep on shouting at me that this is true. Show me some evidence because everything I see from scientific studies to front line workers say, “On occasion or happens, but the harm it does to others is far worse.”
It boggles my mind how you ignore repeated direct responses to your questions, almost like you aren’t actually interested in the answers…
Here it is again, 3rd time on one source, 2nd time on the other. Do I need to use smaller words?
I saw it. I read it. I commented on it.
Do you realize that the Cicero Institute isn’t a journal? I wrote elsewhere who they are. They are not a reliable source.
What is wrong with you? Do you not realize we are having a discussion elsewhere in this thread?
It’s some child trying his first hand at commenting online. Just overly confident and absolutely full of bullshit.
Fucking Trump empowering dipshits like this.