> Stories like this make me wish that it was easier for homeless people to be declared mentally ill and placed into mental health facilities. (Damn you, deinstitutionalization.)
It's actually good that it is not so easy to declare people mentally ill, especially when they're not. Canada has a history of having it's 'social services' go completely out of control when given too much power, one nice example is the service that ostensibly protects children from abuse.
(But in fact is just as likely to do great damage to both children and their families).
I think many people would like to institutionalize the homeless just so the 'problem would go away', but homeless people are a symptom of a society that has issues, not just of those people.
For instance, banks and lawyers contribute to the number of homeless people by making it too easy to declare people bankrupt, seizing their possessions and means of generating income or their house, or to destroy someones life in divorce proceedings.
And then there are those that simply don't want to be part of the 'rat race' that have no other option but to become homeless (the Roma in Europe for instance). That used to be 'ok', but these days everything has to be owned by somebody so there is no way to be out of it all without trespassing.
It's not all clear cut. For sure there are mentally ill people that are homeless but I'd be highly surprised if that was the majority. For the most part they're just ordinary people down on their luck abandoned by friends and family. And plenty of them hit the bottle or drugs after becoming homeless, not before.
Speaking for my own neighborhood, the burden of deinstitutionalization is severe. My carriage house apartment was the residence of a man with Huntington's Disease. Twenty years ago he would have been at the State Hospital; instead, he was given a small stipend and left to die on his own. Of the six windows in the apartment, one survived his habit of throwing things in rage; there was food and nicotine liberally spattered on every surface in the apartment - and if you've never mopped a ceiling before, I assure you the pain in your shoulders is unique after the first day. There was urine in the heating ducts, and he could usually hit the toilet when he defecated, but not always.
The state doesn't want to pay for keeping him in a healthy environment - that's expensive and Indiana doesn't like public expenses. His family apparently couldn't afford it, and arguably that sort of lottery is unfair, deciding that some families get to go without the expense of crazy relatives while others get the short straw.
After the bank foreclosed on the property, he was living in a truck for a while. I don't know what's become of him now.
So tell me again that it's good that people can't be declared mentally ill. There are people who really are mentally ill, and dodging society's duty by saying they're better off dying free is not the answer.
People can be declared mentally ill. It just isn't easy. And that's good. In the case of the person you are describing it would be pretty difficult to get him to be committed in most jurisdictions, especially if he didn't want to be.
Your post contains quite a few misconceptions on bankruptcy. No one can declare you bankrupt - you need to go to court and ask them to do so. Further, most people get to keep their house/car [1] and their "means of generating income" (work tools exemption).
If you mismanage your finances, really the worst you need to worry about is losing some of your stuff (which you probably couldn't afford anyway). If you make more than the median income in your state, you might need to enter a payment plan rather than having your debts wiped away.
The tax man or your ex wife can ruin your life with debts that can't be wiped away. The bank, not so much.
[1] The judge needs to decide that you can continue paying the mortgage, which might not happen if mortgage/month > income/month. Further, there is a value above which this no longer applies - rich people may lose their estate or the Bentley.
Your post contains quite a few assumptions about location and reality.
Having seen a contractor go bankrupt, his house, car and his work tools sold to the highest bidder and the money split evenly between the tax man (the rest of his stuff) and the bank (his house and vehicle) very recently says there is at least one situation where you were simply dead wrong.
There is voluntary bankruptcy, and involuntary bankruptcy, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy it is not fair to suggest all bankruptcies are voluntary.
The main assumption I made is that you were discussing personal bankruptcy rather than corporate bankruptcy (which can be involuntary), due to your statement that it was "too easy to declare people bankrupt".
I suppose under the circumstances you describe, you are correct: a person may lose their job if the corporation they work for goes bankrupt involuntarily. On the other hand, corporate bankruptcy can't touch a person's house/car, unless perhaps that person bet all their personal positions on the success of a corporation.
So I suppose an involuntary corporate bankruptcy may cause the personal bankruptcy of an entrepreneur. I'm still not sure how this rather unusual situation would contribute significantly to the number of homeless.
Personal bankruptcy can be involuntary as well in plenty of places.
Self employed people are private individuals and are with some regularity pushed in to being homeless, either alone or with their families if they have them due to economic downturns.
There now is some nice legislation on the books that will make it impossible to escape credit card debt when you file for voluntary bankruptcy (chapter 7), and it is also much harder to file for that than it was in the past.
Typically an individual that has been declared bankrupt can be evicted from rental property as well because of debt incurred after the stay due to the filing for bankruptcy.
So even on rented property there is no guarantee that filing for personal bankruptcy will protect you from being homeless.
I think many people would like to institutionalize the homeless
I absolutely do not want to institutionalize the homeless. I want to institutionalize the mentally ill.
For sure there are mentally ill people that are homeless but I'd be highly surprised if that was the majority. For the most part they're just ordinary people down on their luck abandoned by friends and family
You're right that the vast majority of people who become homeless are not mentally ill. However, the vast majority of people who stay homeless are mentally ill.
Institutionalize is a nice, clinical sounding word, but what it means is incarcerate. Imprison.
You are talking about locking up people without them committing any crime, without any trial, without them having any appeal or defense, for a week, or a year, or their entire life.
You, I suspect, would condemn a police authority who wanted to imprison whoever it liked, for however long it liked, on grounds of serving the general good. It is just as wrong to give a medical authority those powers and declare they'll only be used to help the people they're imprisoning.
Well - let's keep this in context. I lived in Vancouver both Pre/Post Institutionalization - and I'm pretty certain those people who are chronically homeless lived much better and happier lives when they had a warm home to sleep in, and people to watch out after them.
And, I don't know what institutions you are referring to, but Riverview (one of the mental health institutions) had a Bus Stop in it. Crazy people were always getting on board - It's true that people who posed a threat to themselves or others, or were in for evaluation to determine if that were the case had their ability to leave restricted - but I don't think "Institution" and "Prison" are synonymous.
You are talking about locking up people without them committing any crime, without any trial, without them having any appeal or defense, for a week, or a year, or their entire life.
Not at all. In Canada, at least, people in psychiatric institutions have ample opportunity to challenge their detention. Their cases are reviewed and they are considered for release far more often than those who are convicted of crimes are.
In the bad old days in the U.S., crazy people, or people deemed crazy, could be kept in a mental institution against their will for years and years. When I hear people decrying deinstitutionalization, I assume they want to return to those bad old days.
> However, the vast majority of people who stay homeless are mentally ill.
That's likely true but it is only a very small portion of the total. And many of those are still not mentally ill, just substance abusers (which has it's own long term effects on mentality, compounding the problem).
DSM-IV counts substance abuse as a psychiatric disorder, and research has shown that it is far more effective to treat substance abuse as a health issue than otherwise.
But I think we may have to agree to disagree here.
I think we're already agreeing for the most part: Substance abuse is a different thing than being addicted, you can't use the terms interchangeably.
The one is a mental problem, the other has to do with the brain in a very specific biochemical sense.
I think that for the most part there is plenty of overlap between the two in terms of the people that are afflicted but there is a direct biochemical reason behind being addicted to any drug that is not directly related to mental illness.
To clarify, addiction is a disease. According to Dr Drew Pinsky in an interview on "The Eyes of Nye" (yes, that's another Bill Nye show)
> The definition of a disease for me would be 'an abnormal physiological process brought on by a relationship between the genetics of the individual and the environment. That path of physiology would create a set of signs and symptoms that progress in a predictable way that we would call a 'natural history' and by affecting the natural history we create a predictable response to treatment [...] and addiction does fit that, but people get hung up on where the physiology goes wrong. They don't understand that it's a brain disease.
This article was posted here before (http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_02_13_a_murray.html) and suggests homelessness might be a power-law problem. Ordinary people who are homeless because of everyday misfortune don't stay homeless for long and don't contribute to the homeless problem--chronically homeless people, many of whom are either mentally ill or mentally adapted to life on the street, are the biggest part of the problem.
The power law in the article refers to the costs associated with individuals, and to the number of people that were found to have returned to 'normal' life.
So a relatively small number of people are responsible for the majority of the costs attributed to all homeless people (in that case mostly for hospital treatments), they stay homeless because they can't get out or don't want to get out.
Those homeless people that are very motivated to stop being homeless will usually do so, those that are mentally ill or serious substance abusers have little to no chance.
Those that have 'adapted to life on the streets', I find it hard to find fault with them, they chose that path, the problem is with 'us', the ones that are not homeless because we see them as a problem, but they might disagree.
Being homeless is no picknick, but being in the rat race isn't either and some people might prefer the one over the other.
It's actually good that it is not so easy to declare people mentally ill, especially when they're not. Canada has a history of having it's 'social services' go completely out of control when given too much power, one nice example is the service that ostensibly protects children from abuse.
(But in fact is just as likely to do great damage to both children and their families).
I think many people would like to institutionalize the homeless just so the 'problem would go away', but homeless people are a symptom of a society that has issues, not just of those people.
For instance, banks and lawyers contribute to the number of homeless people by making it too easy to declare people bankrupt, seizing their possessions and means of generating income or their house, or to destroy someones life in divorce proceedings.
And then there are those that simply don't want to be part of the 'rat race' that have no other option but to become homeless (the Roma in Europe for instance). That used to be 'ok', but these days everything has to be owned by somebody so there is no way to be out of it all without trespassing.
It's not all clear cut. For sure there are mentally ill people that are homeless but I'd be highly surprised if that was the majority. For the most part they're just ordinary people down on their luck abandoned by friends and family. And plenty of them hit the bottle or drugs after becoming homeless, not before.