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.
What does that even mean?
Again. We use that policy. You don’t. I have experience. You don’t. None of you’re bullshit makes sense. Mine does.
Housing first gives people housing without requiring them to enter mental health or addiction treatment.
You don’t solve problems that way, you concentrate and amplify them. See all the stories throughout this thread on the continual failure of housing first.
TREATMENT first, then housing.
“Let’s wait until we’ve cured all mental illness to give housing to everyone.”
Yeah see the part in my first comment about how it’s “hard to talk to some Americans”? This is exactly what I mean. This is like talking to someone from a theocracy advocating to kill all the gays. There’s no commonality, there’s no way for me to reason to you, there’s nothing in the real world you’d respond to.
You just hold an opinion, and spam and spam and spam, like another pigheaded religious person.
Housing does not prevent treatment. Those aren’t either or things. Prioritising housing doesn’t mean “we’ll get them an apartment before getting them any help for their mental illness” as I’ve explained in tedious length several times, it means that the policy understands that the foundation of mental health is physical safety that comes from having a place to sleep that’s not the street.
This really isn’t hard.
Imagine how annoying it would be for you to try to talk to a 18th century slaveowner about how it’s not actually good for society to have slavery. Imagine just how annoying it would be to try to calmly talk the some slavers out of their “but they’re sub-human, they love working, I’m just helping them, I’m actually the good guy here”. Just imagine that for a bit.
And then realise that’s the exact conversation we’re having, and you’re on the wrong side of it.
No, let’s make sure people who need treatment get it before they fill their home with garbage and end up howling at faces on the wall that aren’t there.
If someone is homeless because they are mentally ill and/or addicted, just housing them does not solve that problem.
You’re making asinine assumptions that are counterproductive.
With your assumptions, you’ll bar mentally ill people from housing, making their illness worse. Providing housing will further stabilise their situation, and only a tiny margin will fuck up their house to the point of it being actually negative in terms of societal cost. It takes A LOT to fuck up an apartment that bad. I know, as I know social workers who work with substance abusers, therapists, and janitors of people who live in buildings like that.
Yeah, see, again we go back to the “I can’t talk to you” bit because you have assumptions like these, which read to me like “we should kill all the gays” or “blacks are subhuman” or “there’s only two genders” rhetoric.
I genuinely don’t know how to address the assumptions you hold, because they’re so fucking archaic. I live in a country that has the policy you say doesn’t work. We have less mental illness per capita than you.
And you’ve proposed NOTHING. The ONLY thing you’ve said is “don’t give crazy people support.”
It’s not an assumption to say someone who is mentally ill or has substance abuse issues WILL NOT get better on their own. They need help to do it and they are no longer competent to make that decision on their own.
Shuffling them off to “Housing First” makes them sicker, not healthier. They need treatment first, not housing, if you want a permanent solution to the problem.
Otherwise what you end up with is what we see repeated over and over… an endless spiral of declining health and homelessness.
What I’m saying, repeatedly, is break the cycle. Get them the treatment they need FIRST, then, and only then, get them into housing.
If they can’t ever be treated? House them permanently in institutions where they can’t continue harming themselves or others.
But the real question is why are you so dead set against getting these people the help that they need?