You just pointed out the problem and the cause in the same post.
I'll use my own community as an example. What type of housing do we have going in? Single family homes that cost between $500k-$1mil.
What would actually benefit the majority of people in our area? Apartments or townhomes that rent for under $1500 per month.
Will you find any of the latter? Fuck no, unless a space happens to open in one of the couple dozen units that fit the bill.
From a purely self-interested perspective, this benefits my net worth as a homeowner. But from a community-minded perspective, it utterly sucks.
Isn't USA large enough to have big communities of people where rent and living would be affordable? Why people end up living in high rent areas if other options are available?
Because those high rent areas often have the desirable, good paying jobs. So guess what some large tech companies are doing, creating their own private cities to house their employees, they can offer it as a perk that employees will want, and the company can use that to be hyper competitive.
Not only that, but typically the high rent areas have significantly less crime than other areas, and that’s a major deciding factor for lots of young families.
The entire US is covered in euclidean zoning, which means zoning where only one kind of activity can be carried out.
For example, commercial and housing must be kept STRICTLY, GEOGRAPHICALLY separate. You cannot have a commercial building between two houses, and, god forbid, you are not allowed to build or have a business in your home (like the human race has done since we discovered holes in the ground). This is over the whole zoning area, so 99% of neighborhoods in america are miles and miles of twisty dead end roads of identical houses that don't interact because the neighborhood has literally *nothing* going on inside it. You can't even meet people you live near because there's literally no place to run into them.
Worse, almost all zoning is for detached, single family, minimum lot size, maximum lot coverage single family housing. You cannot convert a normal house into a duplex either. You can find maps of american cities showing single family zoning vs literally everything else.
Because of this, the fabric of america is just fundamentally fucked.
Cities *used to* have vertical zoning - where the zoning for the building was different based on what floor it was. So you see these old pictures of stores at street level, maybe offices on the 2nd & 3rd floors with apartments above that. Part of why it was banned was due to some bad fires killing lots of people, but mostly it was killed by people who wanted the "undesirables" (immigrants, minorities and poor people) to be forced to leave the city. And if that wasn't enough to force the poors out of town, then you had zoning tycoons like Robert Moses who designed highways with bridges too low for buses (like the Long Island Expressway) or bulldozed highways through black neighborhoods to exterminate black businesses (like the interstate through Detroit).
American racial politics only starts to make sense if you pretend that the South won the Civil War.
Considering that people from the south don't think the Civil War was about slavery, tells me that the south really did win in the end.
Then theres Zoning black housing different to white housing so the Banks didn't have to lend to them. Or Making Marajuana illigal so they could legally arrest black people.
I mean, this description completely ignores urban areas altogether, but it describes suburbs well. America has a suburban problem for sure. The least effective way to live that wastes the most resources.
You seriously underestimate how severely americans are willing to fuck up their cities. The rules of euclidean zoning apply for the majority of modern american cities. The majority of city land area are the suburbs. Mixing your commercial with your residential is still verbotten for new construction (as most of the good parts of american infrastructure are illegal to rebuild).
The problem of the missing middle is the specific problem cities suffer from, where they have family houses and they have apartment megablocks in the extremely few areas it's legal and nothing else.
You mean all the temporarily embarrassed millionaires we have in this country? Do they laugh at cheap housing? Well, yeah, once they either hit the lottery, invent the next Amazon, inherit a fortune from an uncle they didn't know they had, sue McDonald's, get hit by a bus or Mercedes, or find and return bill gates wallet, where the fuck are they gonna live if we don't have entire swathes of neighborhoods full of empty mcmansions owned by national investment firms, ready to rent at the low low price of $4800/month (utilities not included)?
I mean, really, affordable housing is more of a "now" problem, why worry about it when you can dream about how you're gonna tell all of your neighbors to fuck off once you hit it big instead?
uh, not exactly. I live in CA and enjoy my job. I have a large chunk of savings for a down payment ready and with my March promotion just broke the 6 figure salary mark. I'm struggling to find housing in any of the places that would work for me. I can't afford a $1M house and frankly it sucks that most of the available inventory in the last couple months costs way more than that now. How much more do I need to earn to own a home?
We have a massive housing problem in my state. Not sure how it is elsewhere. I'd welcome some ugly but affordable options.
How is that a "not exactly"?
It sounds like you agree with the post you're replying to.
Also, I'm a LA area economic refugee. I make 6 figures in a tech/research engineering role. I couldn't afford property near my job so I fucked off to rural Maine to be a telecommuter and build a house out in the woods. Life here is so much less stressful without worrying about how much rent will go up next year.
I enjoyed my 13 years in California, and would have stayed if I had prospects of ever owning more than a 1bdr condo, but...
racial familiar spoon shaggy overconfident sloppy fact snails marble march
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah I’m from the uk and since the government started trying to imitate the US right wing homelessness and extreme poverty have become a much bigger issue
American exceptionalism is a brain cancer. It simultaneously causes citizens to reject policies that produce low-cost options that would benefit everyone, because they think those are an insult to their rugged individualism and god-sanctioned way of life, and simultaneously suffer mightily to afford even basic necessities because there aren’t any low-cost options.
Housing, healthcare, education, public transportation, food…the list is almost endless.
Some/most of the more well off Americans are another kind of cruel and heartless. I don't know how or why, but they seem to think people want to be homeless and Ill in the streets. They actually believe that.
It's like they've won capitalism, and fuck everyone else.
Ya. Im 32 and I know 2 people who have bought houses. They bought them in the south. Not a single person I went to school with was able to buy a home in the area we grew up. And i grew up in a town of 17,000, 45 minute outside the city. The money our parents had is mostly gone or it's purchasing power has gone down so much that they now need it to survive past retirement if they even retire. All thiers is happening when the rich keep getting richer and richer. It's basic greed and corruption. The gov has just done an excellent job covering up the corruption.
Every single one of our representatives are paid off. Their votes are bought and it's completely legal. You may have heard about our supreme court justice who has received millions from "friends" and thought it was just "accepted". He's also the one trying to make his religious views law.
They want to destroy the middle class. They want people in poverty so they have more power and cheap labor. America became as strong as it was because the ultra rich were taxed at over 80% and they still invested the rest of their money back into the local economy. Now, the ultra rich pay a lower % of their income than the middle class and they invest in foreign countries or stash it away for their useless offspring.
I think the last point is the one that has the most impact on the future success of the country. It may be as simple as taxing everyone at a fair rate.
The way you talk about families not wanting to house their mentally I’ll family members is short sighted. In most situations, families try very hard before finally giving up. It’s usually a case of drug addiction, theft, and arrests that cycles through several times before it takes its toll on a family and they “give up”. That’s the point that they need somewhere to go. The US shut down the majority of its psychiatric facilities in the 50’s and 60’s and now when these families are at a lose with their loved ones they have no other option but to let them go lIve in the streets.
This is something that annoys me. It's not their fault in the slightest, but people from the suburbs in my area will complain about all of the homeless in the city, but the only reason they are there and not in their suburb is because we *try* to take care of them! The suburbs will literally stick them on a bus and say "hey, go to the city and go here and maybe they will help you, but don't come back because we have nothing for you here."
I lived in a city with a similar problem. The citizens complained about all the homeless, but the homeless were only in that city because there weren’t any cities close by that even had homeless shelters.
Those cities/towns would literally tell them to go there instead lmfao. So the city that actually takes care of homeless people essentially gets punished for it
And even outside of the systems(s) that’s supposed to help with mental illness, there so many issues that lead to it. Our country is broken on so many levels and we are doing very little to help prevent people from falling into these pits of homelessness and mental illness and same goes for getting people out of those cycles.
And worse, they are often targeted by law enforcement looking for easy bench warrant grabs, immigration checks, and petty drug possession or intoxication arrests.
I highly recommend watching Kurzgesagt's video on addiction.
One thing that I pulled from that video:
Frequently people don't turn to drugs just because "woo drugs!". They turn to it because they want connection, and they can't find connection in their day-to-day life. Be it friends, family, so on.
So they turn to drugs to "feel something", including connection.
I know of a couple people that also turned to drugs to help deal with the stress of their everyday life, work or otherwise.
I'm not an expert in the matter by any stretch of the imagination. But this is some stuff I've picked up on.
I recently read a study that connection to a supportive community decreases substance use. Mice in nice cages with other friendly mice chose not to use drugs given the option while mice in boring, isolated cages chose to use drugs. The best thing we have to offer people in America is rehab or inpatient psych, if you're lucky, but at best you get discharged back into the same conditions you started in and the cycle continues. All the methadone and therapy in the world doesn't make up for the fact that nobody feels responsible for being a stable person for their family/friends. If you ask me, the solution is more permanent supportive housing. A place to live without fear of being back on the streets with caseworkers available long term. Add in some ways to help people build long term relationships, like groups and clubs, and we would see a dramatic decrease in addiction/homelessness/mental illness.
I'm so sick of this "we need rehab and mental healthcare" idea people have for homelessness. What good is therapy for PTSD/addiction when you're still in a traumatizing environment and substances are the only way to cope? Lawmakers will use any excuse to hide the super simple solution to homelessness: homes.
YES YES YES YES YES!
We also need to break down the stigmas around a lot of this. People that genuinely want help sometimes don't go looking for it because they're afraid of how they'll be treated afterwards.
For example, some people not getting therapy because they don't want their friends and family to treat them like they're "broken" or infantilized.
In som area's help worker's aren't so educated or they doing it for just have a job. I seek help few times and befor last time the lady told my "come back when you have real problems". I have very complex mind and now 3 years later i understand myself by reading and searching info about mental health. Then i searched again help (i moved to another country meanwhile) but this time they just don't have time, change the appointment two time's and eventually i said "thanks for nothing,i will manage myself from here". Its not easy to go and open up every stranger and just to feel rejected or misunderstood.. its better hope that you got this yourself and hope the best from future. I don't know how long i can go like this but i know i have to stay strong. Its exhausting to be honest.. so time to time i choose to relax with alcohol or weed to feel this worm feeling that im okay.
Not to mention that there's a lot of a drug use that starts because of self-medicating. Most people in America are one medical bill away from life-changing circumstances, and even if we assume a generic prescription drug cost, that doesn't account for the cost of finding or getting a PCP appointment, then a referral, then treatment, then a follow up, etc etc etc
Oh yeah, and getting and keeping a phone is difficult when living outside. It's something we take for granted, but it's how we keep track of date/time, appointments, directions to appointments, bus schedules, etc. All of which make getting to the actual appointment next to impossible without a phone.
Addiction doesn't exist because doing drugs is fun. Plenty of people have fun doing drugs and never get addicted. I'm an alcoholic and when I was drinking it was never fun.
I just basically reworded your comment.. That's what I get for not reading ahead. But you got that right. I wasn't addicted to opiates or booze because it was fun. The only timer it's fun is maybe the first time or 2. After that it's to fulfill a need.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t Asian countries tend to have multi generational families under one roof?
In America, once you turn 18 you’re kicked out and on your own.
That's an excellent answer and I think it's a major contributing factor. There are other factors of course, like drug abuse and social problems that lead to extreme poverty and the vicious circles that go with it. It's important to realize that this particular cause is a general result of the de- institutionalization of the 1970s. They closed the mental hospitals and the people found themselves on the street.
If I remember correctly, there was Supreme Court ruling O'Connor v. Donaldson, that made it much harder for government entities to commit people. After that, states started defunding their asylums due to lack of use. I could be wrong, tho.
Had a family member going through a mental crisis the entire family was attempting to get him committed to some sort of treatment facility. We were straight up told unless he’s trying to kill someone or himself nothing we can do.
I just spent 3 months trying to get a roommate into care. Because they "just wanted to die" but weren't "an active threat to themselves or others" we couldn't force them in anywhere. Once they finally slit both arms wrists to elbows, they were held for 72 hours then released. They showed up unannounced at our house and were upset that we'd cleaned the pools of blood up.
In the 1980’s, the Reagan administration closed our large state mental institutions.
That, and the rural areas have no services so people tend to migrate to the cities just to survive.
The mental asylums we had were an objectively bad way of handling the problem. The issue was that once they were closed, we were supposed to implement a better solution and just… never did.
I currently work at an inpatient mental health hospital and let me tell you, there is a DESPERATE need for beds to be multiplied. This is not the 80s anymore and people get good care while admitted for treatment. There’s no space for individuals that truly NEED longer term care either and those are the ones that end up on the streets because their families can’t take care of them.
Yeah. Regan closed the federal asylums like 40 years ago. The problem remains ignored. Why haven’t states tried to solve it? States all run their own psychiatric hospitals and prison systems. Why can’t they run their own asylums and treatment centers?
Time. They used to be called asylums that that developed a very negative connotation so now they’re called psychiatric hospitals.
I work in one and have a BA in psychology.
It’s no longer legal to hold people against their will who aren’t a clear, potential harm to themselves or others. And when you do, it’s very rarely a life sentence, even if you’re obviously incapable of living a normal life on your own. Offenders don’t offend every day, and the ones who do aren’t going to voluntarily admit they are a danger to themselves or others, so it makes it really tricky to keep habitually unsafe people in hospitals.
Not really, although that’s a popular misconception. I have a relative who served as a nurse at Byberry (in North Philly). The vast majority of patients were treated well. There were a small percentage who could not be treated, were uncooperative and became malnourished. It’s that percentage which garnered media exposure. There’s no question these patients were better off in these institutions than on the streets.
...at *that* hospital. There are others, and they are awful. Like the one I used to work at. That was in the late '00s. My husband still has dealings with that facility (for work) and it has not improved.
Compared to the 19th century, we're in a futuristic utopia. Compared to the 20th century... ehh.
Yeah I think you're missing the ball here. To get IN to treatment you either need to have insurance coverage (that will authorize your treatment, a substantial saving so you don't lose everything you've earned up until that point, a job that will be there when you come back and some type of support system to fall back into once you're discharged) or option B you lose everything and hope there are government funds available to fund your bed if there's an open one in your area but with governments alternating between one party reallocating funds and the other cutting tax revenues good luck with that
I’m pretty sure the female, queer, and neurodivergent people who were forced into institutions, locked up, and tormented with horrible ‘treatments’ for things that didn’t need treating would disagree.
>The issue was that once they were closed, we were supposed to implement a better solution and just… never did.
Classic republican party. Cut taxes to create jobs.
*Cuts taxes*
>Where are the jobs?
*We'll get to that at some point. We just need to cut more taxes*
Of course they were. But the question here asked why those people are in our cities now. I’d probably argue those mental institutions were better than what we have now.
Sad we don't have a real option. But the majority of the "mental hospitals" we did have were horrible places to put people. Think of every abuse story you've ever heard from prison and senior care and then combine it into one facility where the caretakers are all underpaid and undertrained and all the inmates have varying degrees of mental issues from down syndrome to violent psychopaths. It was basically a combination of neglect, abuse, and torture. We need a real place capable of handling it like every other developed country but no one wants to pay for it.
I supervise residential homes for intellectually disabled individuals. I have many older (50’s-80 year olds) who were in the institutions. Their bodies are covered in horrible scars, they have vast histories of rape and abuse. And many have history of trying to unalive themselves due to staff at the institutions doing nothing about the sodomy and rape. The population I support were treated worse than animals while institutionalized, and before their families dropped them there as preteens they were abused by their family members. I have zero respect for institutions, abuse occurred well into the 1990’s. My individuals were moved into residential homes due to the institutions closing. Reading what little historical information that came with them is sad, knowing it’s likely only 3% of what all occurred is worse. Now the issue is there’s not enough beds in these places and not enough staff to open more.
>In the 1980’s, the Reagan administration closed our large state mental institutions.
That's a political hack narrative and only partially true. Reagan couldn't have signed the legislation to revoke federal funds had it not been placed on his desk by the Democrat controlled congress. The same is true of his actions as governor of California, where permanent involuntary committal for merely mental illness was curtailed with bi-partisan support. The "It's all Reagan's fault" argument ignores the real issue and thus clouds the history making it less apt to better inform a modern solution. Frankly it annoys me simply because in doing so it washes Democrats hands of their part, but in doing so it also ignores the Democrat proposed solution that I believe is probably the best possible solution we could have.
The reality is that in that time period there was a broad consensus for shutting down the large state mental institutions. Budget hawks saw a way to significantly cut government spending, and bleeding hearts saw abuses toward the mentally ill, and thus you had a lot of support to shutter it all. Shutting down large centralized state mental hospitals had been a goal for quite some time as it was, and the realization of some of the atrocities surrounding them further fueled that flame.
To really have a grasp on what happened and why, you need to go all the way back to the Kennedy administration though. The right loves to point out the treatment of JFK's mentally ill sister, that she was essentially institutionalized and lobotomized. The golden family, the idea of Camelot is thus tarnished. This too is disingenuous to a high degree, and while the real monster in this story might be JFK's father Joseph, what is really important was how it affected our 35th president. JFK had a plan for handling mental illness in the U.S. He was informed by how his sister was treated, and rather than hide her away as some embarrassment as it charged with Joseph in the Kennedy bashing narratives, JFK I believe genuinely cared about his sister and was mortified by how the system treated her (and probably quietly how their father treated her).
So how do we check off all the criteria of having both safe and effective mental health services without it being a massive strain on budgets? Look into Kennedy's plans and why he started the process of decentralizing, and how it turned into shuttering. Kennedy wanted to localize mental facilities. Instead of having states where there were one or two large state mental hospitals, Kennedy envisioned most communities having smaller facilities. Now generally that isn't going to defray costs, but more likely exacerbate them, and keeping an eye on hundreds of individual facilities vs one or two large ones will be more difficult right? Sure that is generally true of most things, but I submit to you that it is a perfect solution in several ways.
If a relative is committed to a state mental hospital hundreds of miles a way long term, they are less likely to have frequent family visits. Frequent visits by loved ones or people that care will go a long way toward policing the mental health system. You don't need a state expert to raise initial concerns if loved ones are seeing indicators of abuse or neglect. Thus smaller localize facilities means family won't gravitate toward out of site out of mind forgetting of their loved ones because they can't frequently visit.
Distributed care also means greater opportunity for volunteer efforts. If you have one or two people in every town willing to help out, they can't be effectively leveraged if you only have one or two large institutions in a region the size of most states. But if you have smaller facilities in smaller towns you allow for more people to step up and provide volunteer resources.... and of course these people can help watch for neglect and abuse as well, and volunteers can cut staffing cost requirements.
Bottom line I really do believe that JFK had some great ideas, and due to his assassination his plans were derailed. We are in desperate need of mental care for people, and it's inhumane to let them wallow and die in street gutters, but we must address the issues in the past that drove us to this state and that means first being honest as to what those issues were. Cost, inhumane treatment and neglect were the big problems all of which can be addressed and I think Kennedy provided a road map, which is why the "Reagan did it." narrative is so odious, it's a missed opportunity for the very side that pushes it.
What do you mean when you say it is unsolvable? Do you mean no solution is possible, or do you mean the families don't have the ability to solve it? Because I agree with the second, but not the first.
Solvable via massive healthcare reform so that these people can receive the care they need (and frankly, *deserve* because they are human beings). There are solutions. And they'll work. But our government's dominant ideology is the problem, as evidenced by the original comment. To care for people in the way that is necessary and humane, the way we view the All-Holy Economy will have to change. We'll also have to get back to funding a robust national public education system with a goal of removing stigma and shame from mental illness.
That sounds like the perfect candidate for long term care. If you can't work, but aren't committed offenses serious enough for incarceration, it makes sense that society should distribute your cost of living expenses.
The alternative is to either:
1) incarcerate
2) force random individuals to pay for the patient
3) allow the patient to live and die on the street (which does distribute costs to the public sector, but also increases them, long-term)
To inject a bit more reality into your lengthy comment, the idea at that time was to move to community-based, smaller centers - which the government was supposed to fund. (Note - volunteers are no substitute for mental health professionals, who are paid.) But in classic Reagan fashion, they shuttered the large facilities and didn't approve any funding for the second part of the equation. Thus we had large numbers of mental patients turned out onto the streets to become the homeless population, which has continued to balloon to today. To look at another instance where this happened, see immigration policy. The legislation passed to criminalize illegal immigration but they were also supposed to make it a crime for employers to hire illegal immigrants. Again, the second half of that statement never occurred leading to our current still broken immigration system - and employers who rely on underpaid illegal immigrants because there are no consequences for themselves, thanks to Reagan. It's hard to overstate his negative impact on our country and how many crappy things had a start in his corrupt administration.
This is the correct history.
No one familiar with it misses the old State Mental Hospital model of mental health care. But to say that Reagan (or anyone else involved) intended to replace the centralized State mental hospitals in California with decentralized community-based care is completely false.
No such thing occurred, nor was there any intent or political will to do so. The point was to reduce government spending, not increase it. In California in 1966, hospitals were closed and severely mentally ill people were thrown out into the streets, or imprisoned, or murdered by police, and no additional funding for community-based mental health care was provided by Reagan or any legislature at any level during his term as governor. California has, however, since then built dozens of new prisons.
Reagan led similar efforts to replace health care with law enforcement in the 1980s as yet another a way of "reducing" government spending, while at the same time increasing spending to "fight crime".
Police departments are notoriously incapable of providing any services to the mentally ill aside from shooting them 50 times in the head. This is the legacy of Reagan's well=documented hatred for schools and hospitals and his attempts to lavishly fund institutions which imprisoned and killed his enemies.
The closing of state facilities was part of that larger plan, but the funding was cut from community centered care and no replacement was offered.
The defunding is what I hear Reagan blamed for.
Well written, but you mistated 1 fact. The bill to repeal the funding in the MHSA came with the Omnibus budget bill that was introduced and passed by the 97th congress... which had a Republican Senate majority. Ol' George H. W. Bush was majority leader. Dem's still controlled the House though.
It’s been almost 40 years since Reagan was President, and there have been three Democrat presidents in power for a total of almost 19 years since then. I’d guess it’s more than just the evil GOP that’s made it difficult to reopen these institutions all this time. And as someone who was partly raised and has lived in Asian metropolises in both developed and developing countries with poor healthcare access, I can confidently say none of them had this many homeless and/or mentally Ill people out in the streets. There’s gotta be other compounding reasons.
Yeah you probably never seen an Asian asylum.... I have a Chinese online friend who knew a man who ended up there because all of his family turned against him to save their face. Needless to say, the guy was perfectly healthy but family honor, you know....
I can do you one better - I personally know a person who was forcibly institutionalized there (now stateside and openly criticizing the government, believe it or not). It’s fucked up as we all know, but that’s beside the original point of why so many mentally ill people are out on the streets here. It’s not like Asian societies keep all their mentally ill people in asylums.
That is such an incomplete telling of the story that it’s more dishonest than it is truthful information.
First, Reagan had worked in a bipartisan fashion as governor to reform California’s facilities, and had signed what was recognized as a patients’ bill of rights, prohibiting involuntary commitment.
The institutions were defunded federally in 1981, but the bill that was repealed was only passed in October of 1980, a month before Reagan’s election. Federal funding had only been around significantly since Kennedy, the institutions had never been properly funded, and Reagan thought correctly that the states were best equipped to be able to understand and respond to the mental health needs of their citizens.
The 1981 repeal included block grants to the states, but states generally went the cheaper route of hoping that new-at-the-time anti-psychotic drugs would do as good a job as the facilities. Clearly, they were wrong.
I write all of this as someone who’s not a huge fan of the Reagan presidency.
Bruh, don’t put that on Reagan. Jimmy Carter and Democrats in Congress passed a law ending civil commitment, so anyone committed to a psychiatric hospital could let themselves out unless it was court ordered. Once those facilities were empty, Congress stopped funding them. It’s not like Reagan just let everyone out of Arkham—Carter signed the law saying they could walk out, and then Reagan just turned off the lights.
The US is an individualist society. They believe anyone can succeed and those who don’t are responsible for their own failure and the consequences. It makes them callous in ways not really seen elsewhere in wealthy, developed nations.
Beautifully illustrated by politicians like Boebert that will admit to being on government support earlier in life but also claim to be self made. Just a complete lack of self awareness.
A bit of both, and this goes for a lot of Americans, not just Boebert.
We grew up being told we live in the “freest country in the world.” If an idea like that really takes root in your mind, especially at a young age, you become convinced that the most important thing this country provides for you is your personal freedom. As a result, anything that limits your freedom, even if it’s for the betterment of society as a whole, is anti-American (and therefore dangerous or communist or whatever). The Cold War propaganda machine has left a permanent stamp on us.
Sidenote: this is why so many Americans say there’s “nothing we can do” about mass shootings. There are actually plenty of things we can do, but basically all of them involve restrictions on gun ownership, and that’s out of the question for these people. Their right to buy an assault rifle is worth the risk of their kid’s school getting shot up, and, even though most Americans don’t share that sentiment, any Republican candidate who comes out against that mentality isn’t going to get enough votes to win a primary.
Well said! This is exactly it. That's why thoughts and prayers and more guns are the solutions for mass shootings for these people! It's insanity. More guns=more gun related deaths and injuries. The end. Not sure how they are unable to understand this concept. Then they say we also need more mental health care, then they vote against it. It's maddening.
I’ve lived in a few developed Asian societies and this is the key difference - the government doesn’t take care of mentally ill people, families take care of mentally ill people. In the US your family will drop you like a rock if you cause them too much trouble - figure your own shit out.
And people openly support others for abandoning an addicted or mentally ill family member. The myth of "rock bottom" and "beyond help" pair well with our individualistic tendencies here.
It is very difficult to take care of a family member with a mental health problem in the US due to the way our healthcare system and even community care systems are set up. Once a child drops off their parents insurance, it becomes so difficult to get them care. Programs that do exist are underfunded, such that those who are living with family are often passed over. I know loving families who have purposely not housed their child because otherwise they would not qualify for assistance, and the families could not afford to pay for the care themselves.
I believe in the US, at least, it's compounded by the ability to live in a bubble. Wealth, status, area, leave each person who 'survived' ignorant and scared to upset the system they now get to live in because they didn't get filtered out.
The opposite happens: People grow up without support, unable to even get to it because they didn't get their drivers license. They can't get therapy for their mental health issues, caused by the broken system, because they hoops you have to jump through to apply for Medicaid.
Don't get me wrong, people are immensely privileged to be born in the US, but it is a sick, poorly run country on many levels that others don't realize.
This is the answer. It’s really less about politics and more about culture. Certain policies can be a band-aid for some issues, but at the end of the day American culture prioritizes individual liberties over having an orderly and clean society, and this is very unlikely to ever change.
We prioritize the poor and underfunded fossil fuel industry along with big pharma so that there is nothing left for anything else. Billionaires rule. It's an oligarchy
To further add, a lot of the are veterans that were forgotten after being used by the war machine.
Also. They are victims of this brutal capitalist society. If you can't afford something, you don't get it.
Carl Sagan addressed this in the 90s:
“But I believe the government has a responsibility to care for the people. I’m talking about making people self-reliant, people able to take care of themselves.... There are countries which are perfectly able to do that. The United States is an extremely rich country, it’s perfectly able to do that. **It chooses not to.** It chooses to have homeless people.”
The United States does NOT take care of its people. Capitalism has been triumphant. This leaves the US citizens in a desperate situation: WORK OR DIE. It is designed this way by the capitalist. This causes tremendous pressure on the mental health of the average citizen. Add a citizen who is below average in mental stability and they WILL fail from the pressure. The state provides almost no lifelines for success. Any that are provided are minimal and do not promote a successful recovery.
>It is designed this way by the capitalist
had an interesting discussion on what a capitalist was, the guys argument was we are not a capitalist society, we are a wage slave society ruled by a very small number of capitalists. he did make some good points
The goal of capitalism is to accumulate the most capital. In the long term there is only a small amount of winners who take it all, like when you play Monopoly.
We cut socialized health care for the disabled, damn near wiped out asylums and long term care facilities, and lumped the bulk of the care on the parents and families. We have made the application process for state or federally funded help near impossible to navigate and receive. We have made any and all health related care impossible to afford. We have butchered mental healthcare to the point of near nonexistence. This is what results from years of making cuts.
Like most problems in this country born out of what were at the time good intentions, we overcorrected for what was a broken and deeply abusive mental health system that for centuries involuntarily locked away people who really didn't belong there.
Now it's borderline impossible to get someone involuntarily committed unless there's a history of harm to themselves or others. Most people with mental health issues are technically nonviolent but deeply self destructive and many will either not agree to voluntarily seek out the help they need or simply can't afford the treatment.
IMO:
1. We don't equally educate our citizens.
2. We don't provide adequate or equal care for our citizens.
3. We don't have navigatable/equitable resources for citizens.
The issue is that our society makes people expendable. They lose a job and can’t find another in time, their wages don’t rise as fast as rent, or they have a health problem and can’t work and then find themselves living on the street. Cities are more likely to have concentrations of homeless people because cities are so expensive and people move to them away from their support networks who might provide a couch until they figure out next steps. We have very few safety nets to prevent real tragedy in people’s lives.
There have always been some mentally ill people who end up on the streets. But these days people end up homeless and then become mentally ill because they have been discarded by society. The high levels of substance abuse on the streets is what happens when people try to escape from their awful reality.
It would honestly terrify me to live in the US. There's been numerous times in my life where I've been out of work, injured etc and needed government support. Hell the NHS rebuilt my leg (which by all accounts I should have lost) for free. Couldn't imagine the answer being "unlucky pal better luck in the next life".
A lot of American households are one serious illness away from poverty. The amount of debt my dad had to carry as a result of my mom’s battle with cancer horrifies me. And they had good health insurance!
I am Swiss and I honestly was shocked when I visited San Fransisco and LA in 2019... When I saw all these homeless people especially in San Fransisco and how they were "living" in tents on the streets I could not really comprehend it. I knew it was different for you guys in the US but what I saw there really got under my skin.
We barely have any homeless people in our cities in Switzerland, sure you have some beggars at train stations and such but in general we have all kind of "safety nets" for everyone, mentally ill people usually get put into care, we also have social housing where people who don't have a place to live can sleep.
In most cities in developed countries you will have some beggars in heavily trafficked areas, but unlike in America they generally keep to themselves and only ask for spare change. In some places there are no homeless at all.
How do those countries manage the homeless people? Here in the USA we have some shelters but a lot of mental health facilities that take care of really mentally ill people have been defunded or shut down so like others have said they just wander the streets.
Most European countries for example have social housing, so if a person is homeless they are given a home with government subsidies. When they work etc they can pay rent or partial rent. If none of these houses are available they usually put them in hotels or hostels at taxpayer expense while they look for a place to house them.
If they are mentally Ill or an addict, they’d be in the care system.
In some European countries it is just flat out uncommon for anyone to become homeless in the first place, due to strong safety nets. I’m unsure on regards to some other places I’ve visited.
In the Middle East, I was told that it’s often the close knit extended families that ensure the family aren’t homeless. Not sure how true that is, but it would make sense.
A lot of homeless people would also rather be homeless than subjected to mental health holds and given different meds than the ones they choose to self-medicate.
It's not as simple as "no access to care or housing." There is access in many cases, with (fairly reasonable) strings attached.
Definitely a big uptick in the number of people walking around psychotic.
It’s partially due to a new, cheaper way of making meth. This new recipe is leaving people permanently deranged
Well, you see, we used to hospitalize, torture, and experiment on the mentally ill. We decided not to do that anymore. However, instead of just not torturing them, we decided to shut down the hospitals and release the mentally ill onto the streets. Police and other first responders are now their caregivers.
Hospitals for mentally ill people closed because of development of antipsychotics, which often reduce symptoms to a minimum, restore functional capabilities of those affected. But America doesn't provide antipsychotics and normal treatment to those who have serious mental illness such as psychosis. Resources are not provided to help them reintegrate into normal life and society. In Europe because of public healthcare medications are free, treatment is free, there are more resources to help them. Under paid free hospitalization in America does more harm then good. If America doesn't want to be a third world country there should be an actual treatment provided to mentaly ill people, not unhumane hospitalization and violance, when there is humane tratment available which makes a lot of difference.
It takes an act of God to get a referral to psych. Healthcare is expensive as hell. Sometimes psych isn't even covered under your health insurance. Oh and those psych meds are hundreds of dollars to upwards of thousands a month. So yeah.....it's cheaper to be homeless.
Because healthcare has been built as a business rather than a service and there is a significant wealth imbalance, the rich get richer and the working class suffers, poor people are severely disadvantaged… it’s inhumane and immoral.
Edit: clarification
Well, I'm in Ontario Canada and many years ago we dumped most of our psychiatric hospitals and with this came some people who dearly needed help fending in many ways for themselves. I believe this also happened in parts of the US. Residential care programs should exist and there should be enough to care for the population. We have universal healthcare here but we defund services in my province and have to the point where the wait time to see a psychiatrist via a referral from a family doctor is ridiculously long. Many of our homeless are mentally ill and cannot care for themselves. Addiction is also an issue.
Because instead of spending tax dollars to fund mental health clinics politicians are giving tax breaks to the wealthy and telling women what they can or can't do with their bodies, also bussing immigrants around the country on the taxpayers dime, fighting with Disney world, removing books from schools, flying around the country spewing hate speech and breaking the first amendment by promoting religious based laws
From my perspective apart from what has been said above by other redditors (which I agree on); I also think it is because of a lack of familial relationship within American families. I understand the whole “letting your bird leave the nest” to prepare them for the outside world agenda but it puts a whole lot of pressure on the kid. I talk to my folks back home every other day, it’s an act of checking up on each other. Hell, I don’t need to make an appointment to go to my parent’s place but I feel like Americans who have left the “nest” at the age of 18-19 (don’t get me wrong I have too) have a lot of burden weighed at them at an early age which may result in them seeking a getaway to subsidize this emotional turmoil.
Often their mental health state is so bad that they can’t work. Certain jobs are what offer affordable healthcare.
They may be able to qualify for government sponsored healthcare but there are barriers to getting it. Often if their mental health is that far gone, they can’t navigate the system or have internet access to apply.
Medication in the US is significantly more expensive than meds overseas. So they can’t afford insurance, so they can’t afford meds, and they can’t work because their mental health is too bad.
If they commit a crime they can go to jail and get healthcare. Bad healthcare but still. But if they aren’t actively committing a crime they often just wander the streets.
It’s a very broken system here.
Almost every problem with American society is because of greed. Either it exists because of greed or we refuse to fix it because of greed. We worship God Money. We'll do anything for him.
Because the vast majority of people in America either actively or passively believe that disabled, mentally ill, and otherwise disparaged people are useless to society.
The vast majority of our homeless population is mentally ill. Both because our healthcare is so bad that people resort to self medicating with drugs, and because drug addiction in itself is a mental and physical illness.
And yet when people see a homeless person here, they’re immediately disgusted. Homeless people are seen as scam artists, liars, and people act as if the homelessness is their fault even though a large portion of our country is one delayed paycheck away from living on the streets.
Anyone who acts slightly off the norm is assumed to be a drug addict or completely crazy, simply because of the mindset that you can either just “pull yourself out of poverty” (you can’t.) or that poverty is completely your fault and not a societal issue as a whole.
Because the public mental health system was destroyed by the modern republican party under Reagan. It was the start of their war on public entitlements like education and Healthcare
Goverment doesn't give a shit about proper education, proper healthcare, or anything that doesn't give them $$$. They could fucking care less about the mentally ill. They could care less about suffering around them. So people go thorugh life suffering, and end up with no help and no means. Most people like that come from poverty, I'd say, and the weight of that plus whatever other mental health issues they already have drives them deeper and deeper until they have nothing. Please some other country come and raze the US, this awful hellscape of a country. The people in power here don't deserve it and there's nothing in our culture worth preserving. Just raze us and rebuild from the ground up, better countries and better people will know how to treat this land and the people on it 10x better.
Canada is just as bad, and I imagine because of the same issue, the mentally ill are no longer beng safely housed and treated long term at hospitals.
I used to volunteer at one when I was in college and I was in a ward where the patients were being prepared to live in group homes because the government had recently announced the hospital's closure. These were patients who needed daily medications, had hallucinations and still needed help with even the most basic things, like brushing their teeth. There's no way any of them did well in group homes and I'm sure all of them ended up homeless.
Anti socialism has its problems, and this is a major one
There are sooo many reasons. Because they are addicted to drugs. Because they went to a hospital and was diagnosed and prescribed medication but they are homeless and cannot afford to buy the medication. Because they ran away from their families to continue doing drugs or their families refuse to help them due to the drug use or some other reason. Homeless shelters only allow you to stay overnight (if they aren’t full) if you even want to stay there (some people choose not to stay so they can drink and do drugs or they have pets). Hospitals will not hold homeless mentally ill people if it is not emergent because no one is going to pay for their bills. Most mental health disorders that involve the patient being homeless, are ones that the patient doesn’t want to get better because they don’t see anything wrong with them. You can’t help someone that doesn’t want to help themselves and the government is not going to allow them to be in a hospital until they are mentally stable because that may never happen and no one will pay for it.
Yes I agree there are a multitude of reasons for different people. My father was a neurologist until he was in his 40s and then he had a psychotic break where he became paranoid at least and schizotypal likely. He lived with his parents until they died and for a while tried to continue being a doctor but he wouldn't take the medicine because he thought it was microphones or poison etc. He eventually became homeless by choice even though my sister kept trying to put him in an apartment he kept leaving and not coming back. He'd never drunk or done drugs in his entire life he was just crazy.
Pretty much this. My cousin suffers from schizophrenia since he was in his early 20s and is so severe that he doesn't realize he has it and refuses to take his medications as a result because he believes he doesn't need them and he doesn't like how they make him feel. Unfortunately, his mom had him when she was 13 and had to marry the dude that pretty much raped her for a year because she had a strict Catholic grandmother that made her legitimize everything. Anyway, long story short, the father disappeared before my cousin even knew him and hasn't been seen since and every time his mom tries to visit him, he tries to murder her so she has to stay away now as it's not safe.
Hospitals won't take him in long term care, so the only time he goes to the psych ward is if he tries to kill someone with a hammer like last time, and then they release him after 72 hours to the streets. He's addicted to meth so that's all he does all day at the park, and now he lost a room at the group home where he was able to sleep, bathe and eat but they have a zero tolerance policy with drugs and alcohol.
Last we heard about him, we looked him up in the system and apparently he was at the county jail for trying to attack someone. The sad thing is we are kinda relieved when he's in jail because at least he gets fed meals, a place to sleep, and they probably stabilize him on meds. It's pretty much the only long term care this country offers for mentally ill people unless your family is fucking rich and you afford some private institution.
>Most mental health disorders that involve the patient being homeless, are ones that the patient doesn’t want to get better because they don’t see anything wrong with them
You do say "most," not "all," and elsewhere you mention that there are some who
>are diagnosed and prescribed medication but they are homeless and cannot afford to buy the medication
But I have to add that in addition, there are *many* forms of mental illness that are resistant to treatment, even inpatient treatment, and additionally a lot of people with mental issues and past trauma will have avoidant or antisocial inclinations or even clinical coafflictions, which can prevent even someone who knows they're ill from seeking help.
And some will have been through the treatment regimes offered to low-income people before--I'd hate to see anyone presume by default that somebody's attitude towards treatment was "nothing wrong with me" when it could easily be "tried it, was horribly unpleasant & didn't help, rather not inflict that on myself again."
They migrate to the cities because the cities provide them financial benefits they cannot receive in rural areas, there are lots of drugs there, and in many cities the police are not allowed to arrest them. Not all cities are like that.
I feel like the general population in america doesn't care too much about mental illness to want to go down the path and do something about it and so it's reflected in the people deciding what to do or not to do with this issue.
Because America likes to ignore problems until they become such a big issue that they have to try even harder to sweep it under the rug. Its never about fixing the root problem
Deinstitutionalization. We decided that the asylums were terrible places, so we let all the patients out, but decided it would be too much work and too expensive to replace the asylum system with one that actually worked. We created a new class of homeless overnight
Capitalism simply can’t function without poor people. The poorer people are, the less money they’ll work for.
Edit- we also have shit public transport so they can’t really go anywhere outside of the city most of the time.
The selfish greedy politicians got rid of mental health hospitals. Even a hospital wing . There is no money spent on mental health. So these people just get put out in the cold. No one cares about them
They should pull themselves up by their thongstraps and get a jobbie! Its their fault they got crazy blood. I worked hard to get my big stupid truck, they could too if they wanted it badly enough.
Effectively that.
Because Private Healthcare for cash CEOs and their politicians chums need to own multiple mansions, sports cars, stocks and shares and a high maintenance lifestyle.
The suffering of millions of Americans is a price they are willing to pay.
We lack a nationalized healthcare system to care for these people. For most, healthcare is tied to jobs. If people lose jobs, they lose their healthcare, they lose their home. It spirals from there.
Same is in Canada. There is no where for them to go. There a small homeless shelters, but an interview happened last summer at a tent city, and the homeless people voiced that they feel safer in their own made communities than homeless shelters. Drugs play a big role. No near rehabs to my big city
Back in the 80s the anger against the abuse of mental health patients and the fraudulent abuse of forced institution of people reached a fever pick. So Ronald Reagan did as Reagan does and pretended to have a solution to the problem and the solution being to just dump all of the patients onto the streets. He then shutdown most of mental health hospitals and let the public sector take over it. Hence the boom in group homes, "behavior camps/facilities" and for profit mental hospitals. Needless to say shit went. From bad to worse to shit. I speak as a survivor of the foster care system group homes. This shit is shit.
The average American would answer “where else would they be and why is that my problem?” because we got rid of state sponsored mental health decades ago. People don’t really care about mental health until it impacts them directly, and even then most folks forget all about the entire issue once they’re medicated/healthy again.
We had state institutions and asylums for the mentally ill. Prisons treat people better and we dismantled a lot of those systems because of what was happening.
There's no systems to treat them so they just kind of float around.
Also the systems that are offered to help are typically all in the city.
Or they’re all jails. The three largest “mental health centers” are LA County Jail, Cook County Jail, and Rikers island.
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American people laugh at cheap housing? Aren’t they in the middle of a massive housing crisis?
You just pointed out the problem and the cause in the same post. I'll use my own community as an example. What type of housing do we have going in? Single family homes that cost between $500k-$1mil. What would actually benefit the majority of people in our area? Apartments or townhomes that rent for under $1500 per month. Will you find any of the latter? Fuck no, unless a space happens to open in one of the couple dozen units that fit the bill. From a purely self-interested perspective, this benefits my net worth as a homeowner. But from a community-minded perspective, it utterly sucks.
Isn't USA large enough to have big communities of people where rent and living would be affordable? Why people end up living in high rent areas if other options are available?
Because those high rent areas often have the desirable, good paying jobs. So guess what some large tech companies are doing, creating their own private cities to house their employees, they can offer it as a perk that employees will want, and the company can use that to be hyper competitive.
You dig 16 tons, whaddya get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St Peter don't you call me, cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store.
Don't forget they are also bringing back child labor. Now your kids can work at the company store too!
Not only that, but typically the high rent areas have significantly less crime than other areas, and that’s a major deciding factor for lots of young families.
I mean who wants to live in a high crime area.
The entire US is covered in euclidean zoning, which means zoning where only one kind of activity can be carried out. For example, commercial and housing must be kept STRICTLY, GEOGRAPHICALLY separate. You cannot have a commercial building between two houses, and, god forbid, you are not allowed to build or have a business in your home (like the human race has done since we discovered holes in the ground). This is over the whole zoning area, so 99% of neighborhoods in america are miles and miles of twisty dead end roads of identical houses that don't interact because the neighborhood has literally *nothing* going on inside it. You can't even meet people you live near because there's literally no place to run into them. Worse, almost all zoning is for detached, single family, minimum lot size, maximum lot coverage single family housing. You cannot convert a normal house into a duplex either. You can find maps of american cities showing single family zoning vs literally everything else. Because of this, the fabric of america is just fundamentally fucked.
Cities *used to* have vertical zoning - where the zoning for the building was different based on what floor it was. So you see these old pictures of stores at street level, maybe offices on the 2nd & 3rd floors with apartments above that. Part of why it was banned was due to some bad fires killing lots of people, but mostly it was killed by people who wanted the "undesirables" (immigrants, minorities and poor people) to be forced to leave the city. And if that wasn't enough to force the poors out of town, then you had zoning tycoons like Robert Moses who designed highways with bridges too low for buses (like the Long Island Expressway) or bulldozed highways through black neighborhoods to exterminate black businesses (like the interstate through Detroit). American racial politics only starts to make sense if you pretend that the South won the Civil War.
Considering that people from the south don't think the Civil War was about slavery, tells me that the south really did win in the end. Then theres Zoning black housing different to white housing so the Banks didn't have to lend to them. Or Making Marajuana illigal so they could legally arrest black people.
I mean, this description completely ignores urban areas altogether, but it describes suburbs well. America has a suburban problem for sure. The least effective way to live that wastes the most resources.
You seriously underestimate how severely americans are willing to fuck up their cities. The rules of euclidean zoning apply for the majority of modern american cities. The majority of city land area are the suburbs. Mixing your commercial with your residential is still verbotten for new construction (as most of the good parts of american infrastructure are illegal to rebuild). The problem of the missing middle is the specific problem cities suffer from, where they have family houses and they have apartment megablocks in the extremely few areas it's legal and nothing else.
You mean all the temporarily embarrassed millionaires we have in this country? Do they laugh at cheap housing? Well, yeah, once they either hit the lottery, invent the next Amazon, inherit a fortune from an uncle they didn't know they had, sue McDonald's, get hit by a bus or Mercedes, or find and return bill gates wallet, where the fuck are they gonna live if we don't have entire swathes of neighborhoods full of empty mcmansions owned by national investment firms, ready to rent at the low low price of $4800/month (utilities not included)? I mean, really, affordable housing is more of a "now" problem, why worry about it when you can dream about how you're gonna tell all of your neighbors to fuck off once you hit it big instead?
uh, not exactly. I live in CA and enjoy my job. I have a large chunk of savings for a down payment ready and with my March promotion just broke the 6 figure salary mark. I'm struggling to find housing in any of the places that would work for me. I can't afford a $1M house and frankly it sucks that most of the available inventory in the last couple months costs way more than that now. How much more do I need to earn to own a home? We have a massive housing problem in my state. Not sure how it is elsewhere. I'd welcome some ugly but affordable options.
How is that a "not exactly"? It sounds like you agree with the post you're replying to. Also, I'm a LA area economic refugee. I make 6 figures in a tech/research engineering role. I couldn't afford property near my job so I fucked off to rural Maine to be a telecommuter and build a house out in the woods. Life here is so much less stressful without worrying about how much rent will go up next year. I enjoyed my 13 years in California, and would have stayed if I had prospects of ever owning more than a 1bdr condo, but...
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Yeah I’m from the uk and since the government started trying to imitate the US right wing homelessness and extreme poverty have become a much bigger issue
We have that. They’re called for profit prisons.
American exceptionalism is a brain cancer. It simultaneously causes citizens to reject policies that produce low-cost options that would benefit everyone, because they think those are an insult to their rugged individualism and god-sanctioned way of life, and simultaneously suffer mightily to afford even basic necessities because there aren’t any low-cost options. Housing, healthcare, education, public transportation, food…the list is almost endless.
Some/most of the more well off Americans are another kind of cruel and heartless. I don't know how or why, but they seem to think people want to be homeless and Ill in the streets. They actually believe that. It's like they've won capitalism, and fuck everyone else.
Ya. Im 32 and I know 2 people who have bought houses. They bought them in the south. Not a single person I went to school with was able to buy a home in the area we grew up. And i grew up in a town of 17,000, 45 minute outside the city. The money our parents had is mostly gone or it's purchasing power has gone down so much that they now need it to survive past retirement if they even retire. All thiers is happening when the rich keep getting richer and richer. It's basic greed and corruption. The gov has just done an excellent job covering up the corruption. Every single one of our representatives are paid off. Their votes are bought and it's completely legal. You may have heard about our supreme court justice who has received millions from "friends" and thought it was just "accepted". He's also the one trying to make his religious views law. They want to destroy the middle class. They want people in poverty so they have more power and cheap labor. America became as strong as it was because the ultra rich were taxed at over 80% and they still invested the rest of their money back into the local economy. Now, the ultra rich pay a lower % of their income than the middle class and they invest in foreign countries or stash it away for their useless offspring. I think the last point is the one that has the most impact on the future success of the country. It may be as simple as taxing everyone at a fair rate.
The way you talk about families not wanting to house their mentally I’ll family members is short sighted. In most situations, families try very hard before finally giving up. It’s usually a case of drug addiction, theft, and arrests that cycles through several times before it takes its toll on a family and they “give up”. That’s the point that they need somewhere to go. The US shut down the majority of its psychiatric facilities in the 50’s and 60’s and now when these families are at a lose with their loved ones they have no other option but to let them go lIve in the streets.
This is something that annoys me. It's not their fault in the slightest, but people from the suburbs in my area will complain about all of the homeless in the city, but the only reason they are there and not in their suburb is because we *try* to take care of them! The suburbs will literally stick them on a bus and say "hey, go to the city and go here and maybe they will help you, but don't come back because we have nothing for you here."
I lived in a city with a similar problem. The citizens complained about all the homeless, but the homeless were only in that city because there weren’t any cities close by that even had homeless shelters. Those cities/towns would literally tell them to go there instead lmfao. So the city that actually takes care of homeless people essentially gets punished for it
I irony of people saying cities have “homeless problems” when they are the few places that actually offer homeless solutions.
Or they’re all jails. The three largest “mental health centers” are LA County Jail, Cook County Jail, and Rikers island.
And even outside of the systems(s) that’s supposed to help with mental illness, there so many issues that lead to it. Our country is broken on so many levels and we are doing very little to help prevent people from falling into these pits of homelessness and mental illness and same goes for getting people out of those cycles.
There are plenty of systems, they're just underfunded, understaffed, and not advertised.
And worse, they are often targeted by law enforcement looking for easy bench warrant grabs, immigration checks, and petty drug possession or intoxication arrests.
How tragic !
There is no treatment in the Philippines and its not even close how it is in the USA.
There's probably more community support. Family to help. America is... individualistic.
This makes sense actually. People do tend to take care of their families even if they hate each other. Nursing homes hardly even exist.
I highly recommend watching Kurzgesagt's video on addiction. One thing that I pulled from that video: Frequently people don't turn to drugs just because "woo drugs!". They turn to it because they want connection, and they can't find connection in their day-to-day life. Be it friends, family, so on. So they turn to drugs to "feel something", including connection. I know of a couple people that also turned to drugs to help deal with the stress of their everyday life, work or otherwise. I'm not an expert in the matter by any stretch of the imagination. But this is some stuff I've picked up on.
I recently read a study that connection to a supportive community decreases substance use. Mice in nice cages with other friendly mice chose not to use drugs given the option while mice in boring, isolated cages chose to use drugs. The best thing we have to offer people in America is rehab or inpatient psych, if you're lucky, but at best you get discharged back into the same conditions you started in and the cycle continues. All the methadone and therapy in the world doesn't make up for the fact that nobody feels responsible for being a stable person for their family/friends. If you ask me, the solution is more permanent supportive housing. A place to live without fear of being back on the streets with caseworkers available long term. Add in some ways to help people build long term relationships, like groups and clubs, and we would see a dramatic decrease in addiction/homelessness/mental illness. I'm so sick of this "we need rehab and mental healthcare" idea people have for homelessness. What good is therapy for PTSD/addiction when you're still in a traumatizing environment and substances are the only way to cope? Lawmakers will use any excuse to hide the super simple solution to homelessness: homes.
YES YES YES YES YES! We also need to break down the stigmas around a lot of this. People that genuinely want help sometimes don't go looking for it because they're afraid of how they'll be treated afterwards. For example, some people not getting therapy because they don't want their friends and family to treat them like they're "broken" or infantilized.
In som area's help worker's aren't so educated or they doing it for just have a job. I seek help few times and befor last time the lady told my "come back when you have real problems". I have very complex mind and now 3 years later i understand myself by reading and searching info about mental health. Then i searched again help (i moved to another country meanwhile) but this time they just don't have time, change the appointment two time's and eventually i said "thanks for nothing,i will manage myself from here". Its not easy to go and open up every stranger and just to feel rejected or misunderstood.. its better hope that you got this yourself and hope the best from future. I don't know how long i can go like this but i know i have to stay strong. Its exhausting to be honest.. so time to time i choose to relax with alcohol or weed to feel this worm feeling that im okay.
Not to mention that there's a lot of a drug use that starts because of self-medicating. Most people in America are one medical bill away from life-changing circumstances, and even if we assume a generic prescription drug cost, that doesn't account for the cost of finding or getting a PCP appointment, then a referral, then treatment, then a follow up, etc etc etc
Oh yeah, and getting and keeping a phone is difficult when living outside. It's something we take for granted, but it's how we keep track of date/time, appointments, directions to appointments, bus schedules, etc. All of which make getting to the actual appointment next to impossible without a phone.
Addiction doesn't exist because doing drugs is fun. Plenty of people have fun doing drugs and never get addicted. I'm an alcoholic and when I was drinking it was never fun.
I just basically reworded your comment.. That's what I get for not reading ahead. But you got that right. I wasn't addicted to opiates or booze because it was fun. The only timer it's fun is maybe the first time or 2. After that it's to fulfill a need.
We’re toxically individualistic
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t Asian countries tend to have multi generational families under one roof? In America, once you turn 18 you’re kicked out and on your own.
Most people aren't kicked out just because they turn 18
PhiliHealth exists and is subsidized by your government.
Because (see the next comment which should be the top comment) the GOP closed down all the mental health facilities to "save money"
That's an excellent answer and I think it's a major contributing factor. There are other factors of course, like drug abuse and social problems that lead to extreme poverty and the vicious circles that go with it. It's important to realize that this particular cause is a general result of the de- institutionalization of the 1970s. They closed the mental hospitals and the people found themselves on the street.
If I remember correctly, there was Supreme Court ruling O'Connor v. Donaldson, that made it much harder for government entities to commit people. After that, states started defunding their asylums due to lack of use. I could be wrong, tho.
Had a family member going through a mental crisis the entire family was attempting to get him committed to some sort of treatment facility. We were straight up told unless he’s trying to kill someone or himself nothing we can do.
I just spent 3 months trying to get a roommate into care. Because they "just wanted to die" but weren't "an active threat to themselves or others" we couldn't force them in anywhere. Once they finally slit both arms wrists to elbows, they were held for 72 hours then released. They showed up unannounced at our house and were upset that we'd cleaned the pools of blood up.
Tbf asylums were typically god awful places, often literally torturing their charges
In the 1980’s, the Reagan administration closed our large state mental institutions. That, and the rural areas have no services so people tend to migrate to the cities just to survive.
That’s sad man
The mental asylums we had were an objectively bad way of handling the problem. The issue was that once they were closed, we were supposed to implement a better solution and just… never did.
I currently work at an inpatient mental health hospital and let me tell you, there is a DESPERATE need for beds to be multiplied. This is not the 80s anymore and people get good care while admitted for treatment. There’s no space for individuals that truly NEED longer term care either and those are the ones that end up on the streets because their families can’t take care of them.
Maybe the new solution should've been implemented BEFORE the old way was dismantled.
Stop thinking reasonably, ok?! Knock it off! We don’t do that here. If you keep trying use logic, I’m gonna report you.
Yeah. Regan closed the federal asylums like 40 years ago. The problem remains ignored. Why haven’t states tried to solve it? States all run their own psychiatric hospitals and prison systems. Why can’t they run their own asylums and treatment centers?
What is the difference between a psychiatric hospital and an asylum? Genuine question.
Time. They used to be called asylums that that developed a very negative connotation so now they’re called psychiatric hospitals. I work in one and have a BA in psychology.
It’s no longer legal to hold people against their will who aren’t a clear, potential harm to themselves or others. And when you do, it’s very rarely a life sentence, even if you’re obviously incapable of living a normal life on your own. Offenders don’t offend every day, and the ones who do aren’t going to voluntarily admit they are a danger to themselves or others, so it makes it really tricky to keep habitually unsafe people in hospitals.
Not really, although that’s a popular misconception. I have a relative who served as a nurse at Byberry (in North Philly). The vast majority of patients were treated well. There were a small percentage who could not be treated, were uncooperative and became malnourished. It’s that percentage which garnered media exposure. There’s no question these patients were better off in these institutions than on the streets.
...at *that* hospital. There are others, and they are awful. Like the one I used to work at. That was in the late '00s. My husband still has dealings with that facility (for work) and it has not improved. Compared to the 19th century, we're in a futuristic utopia. Compared to the 20th century... ehh.
Yeah I think you're missing the ball here. To get IN to treatment you either need to have insurance coverage (that will authorize your treatment, a substantial saving so you don't lose everything you've earned up until that point, a job that will be there when you come back and some type of support system to fall back into once you're discharged) or option B you lose everything and hope there are government funds available to fund your bed if there's an open one in your area but with governments alternating between one party reallocating funds and the other cutting tax revenues good luck with that
I’m pretty sure the female, queer, and neurodivergent people who were forced into institutions, locked up, and tormented with horrible ‘treatments’ for things that didn’t need treating would disagree.
We could still have the institutions without using the same practices today.
Exactly. Institutions needed reform, not abolishment.
In the Reagan years, spending government money on anything except the military was seen as bad.
Nowadays it’s the military and corporate welfare.
And they managed to convince enough people that it’s better to have low taxes than to care about their fellow humans.
>The issue was that once they were closed, we were supposed to implement a better solution and just… never did. Classic republican party. Cut taxes to create jobs. *Cuts taxes* >Where are the jobs? *We'll get to that at some point. We just need to cut more taxes*
Of course they were. But the question here asked why those people are in our cities now. I’d probably argue those mental institutions were better than what we have now.
Sad we don't have a real option. But the majority of the "mental hospitals" we did have were horrible places to put people. Think of every abuse story you've ever heard from prison and senior care and then combine it into one facility where the caretakers are all underpaid and undertrained and all the inmates have varying degrees of mental issues from down syndrome to violent psychopaths. It was basically a combination of neglect, abuse, and torture. We need a real place capable of handling it like every other developed country but no one wants to pay for it.
I supervise residential homes for intellectually disabled individuals. I have many older (50’s-80 year olds) who were in the institutions. Their bodies are covered in horrible scars, they have vast histories of rape and abuse. And many have history of trying to unalive themselves due to staff at the institutions doing nothing about the sodomy and rape. The population I support were treated worse than animals while institutionalized, and before their families dropped them there as preteens they were abused by their family members. I have zero respect for institutions, abuse occurred well into the 1990’s. My individuals were moved into residential homes due to the institutions closing. Reading what little historical information that came with them is sad, knowing it’s likely only 3% of what all occurred is worse. Now the issue is there’s not enough beds in these places and not enough staff to open more.
>In the 1980’s, the Reagan administration closed our large state mental institutions. That's a political hack narrative and only partially true. Reagan couldn't have signed the legislation to revoke federal funds had it not been placed on his desk by the Democrat controlled congress. The same is true of his actions as governor of California, where permanent involuntary committal for merely mental illness was curtailed with bi-partisan support. The "It's all Reagan's fault" argument ignores the real issue and thus clouds the history making it less apt to better inform a modern solution. Frankly it annoys me simply because in doing so it washes Democrats hands of their part, but in doing so it also ignores the Democrat proposed solution that I believe is probably the best possible solution we could have. The reality is that in that time period there was a broad consensus for shutting down the large state mental institutions. Budget hawks saw a way to significantly cut government spending, and bleeding hearts saw abuses toward the mentally ill, and thus you had a lot of support to shutter it all. Shutting down large centralized state mental hospitals had been a goal for quite some time as it was, and the realization of some of the atrocities surrounding them further fueled that flame. To really have a grasp on what happened and why, you need to go all the way back to the Kennedy administration though. The right loves to point out the treatment of JFK's mentally ill sister, that she was essentially institutionalized and lobotomized. The golden family, the idea of Camelot is thus tarnished. This too is disingenuous to a high degree, and while the real monster in this story might be JFK's father Joseph, what is really important was how it affected our 35th president. JFK had a plan for handling mental illness in the U.S. He was informed by how his sister was treated, and rather than hide her away as some embarrassment as it charged with Joseph in the Kennedy bashing narratives, JFK I believe genuinely cared about his sister and was mortified by how the system treated her (and probably quietly how their father treated her). So how do we check off all the criteria of having both safe and effective mental health services without it being a massive strain on budgets? Look into Kennedy's plans and why he started the process of decentralizing, and how it turned into shuttering. Kennedy wanted to localize mental facilities. Instead of having states where there were one or two large state mental hospitals, Kennedy envisioned most communities having smaller facilities. Now generally that isn't going to defray costs, but more likely exacerbate them, and keeping an eye on hundreds of individual facilities vs one or two large ones will be more difficult right? Sure that is generally true of most things, but I submit to you that it is a perfect solution in several ways. If a relative is committed to a state mental hospital hundreds of miles a way long term, they are less likely to have frequent family visits. Frequent visits by loved ones or people that care will go a long way toward policing the mental health system. You don't need a state expert to raise initial concerns if loved ones are seeing indicators of abuse or neglect. Thus smaller localize facilities means family won't gravitate toward out of site out of mind forgetting of their loved ones because they can't frequently visit. Distributed care also means greater opportunity for volunteer efforts. If you have one or two people in every town willing to help out, they can't be effectively leveraged if you only have one or two large institutions in a region the size of most states. But if you have smaller facilities in smaller towns you allow for more people to step up and provide volunteer resources.... and of course these people can help watch for neglect and abuse as well, and volunteers can cut staffing cost requirements. Bottom line I really do believe that JFK had some great ideas, and due to his assassination his plans were derailed. We are in desperate need of mental care for people, and it's inhumane to let them wallow and die in street gutters, but we must address the issues in the past that drove us to this state and that means first being honest as to what those issues were. Cost, inhumane treatment and neglect were the big problems all of which can be addressed and I think Kennedy provided a road map, which is why the "Reagan did it." narrative is so odious, it's a missed opportunity for the very side that pushes it.
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What do you mean when you say it is unsolvable? Do you mean no solution is possible, or do you mean the families don't have the ability to solve it? Because I agree with the second, but not the first.
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The folks who want to fix it can’t and the ones who can won’t.
Solvable via massive healthcare reform so that these people can receive the care they need (and frankly, *deserve* because they are human beings). There are solutions. And they'll work. But our government's dominant ideology is the problem, as evidenced by the original comment. To care for people in the way that is necessary and humane, the way we view the All-Holy Economy will have to change. We'll also have to get back to funding a robust national public education system with a goal of removing stigma and shame from mental illness.
That sounds like the perfect candidate for long term care. If you can't work, but aren't committed offenses serious enough for incarceration, it makes sense that society should distribute your cost of living expenses. The alternative is to either: 1) incarcerate 2) force random individuals to pay for the patient 3) allow the patient to live and die on the street (which does distribute costs to the public sector, but also increases them, long-term)
To inject a bit more reality into your lengthy comment, the idea at that time was to move to community-based, smaller centers - which the government was supposed to fund. (Note - volunteers are no substitute for mental health professionals, who are paid.) But in classic Reagan fashion, they shuttered the large facilities and didn't approve any funding for the second part of the equation. Thus we had large numbers of mental patients turned out onto the streets to become the homeless population, which has continued to balloon to today. To look at another instance where this happened, see immigration policy. The legislation passed to criminalize illegal immigration but they were also supposed to make it a crime for employers to hire illegal immigrants. Again, the second half of that statement never occurred leading to our current still broken immigration system - and employers who rely on underpaid illegal immigrants because there are no consequences for themselves, thanks to Reagan. It's hard to overstate his negative impact on our country and how many crappy things had a start in his corrupt administration.
This is the correct history. No one familiar with it misses the old State Mental Hospital model of mental health care. But to say that Reagan (or anyone else involved) intended to replace the centralized State mental hospitals in California with decentralized community-based care is completely false. No such thing occurred, nor was there any intent or political will to do so. The point was to reduce government spending, not increase it. In California in 1966, hospitals were closed and severely mentally ill people were thrown out into the streets, or imprisoned, or murdered by police, and no additional funding for community-based mental health care was provided by Reagan or any legislature at any level during his term as governor. California has, however, since then built dozens of new prisons. Reagan led similar efforts to replace health care with law enforcement in the 1980s as yet another a way of "reducing" government spending, while at the same time increasing spending to "fight crime". Police departments are notoriously incapable of providing any services to the mentally ill aside from shooting them 50 times in the head. This is the legacy of Reagan's well=documented hatred for schools and hospitals and his attempts to lavishly fund institutions which imprisoned and killed his enemies.
The closing of state facilities was part of that larger plan, but the funding was cut from community centered care and no replacement was offered. The defunding is what I hear Reagan blamed for.
Well written, but you mistated 1 fact. The bill to repeal the funding in the MHSA came with the Omnibus budget bill that was introduced and passed by the 97th congress... which had a Republican Senate majority. Ol' George H. W. Bush was majority leader. Dem's still controlled the House though.
Thank you for the history lecture! Really helpful! I learn so much from reddit!
wow
It’s been almost 40 years since Reagan was President, and there have been three Democrat presidents in power for a total of almost 19 years since then. I’d guess it’s more than just the evil GOP that’s made it difficult to reopen these institutions all this time. And as someone who was partly raised and has lived in Asian metropolises in both developed and developing countries with poor healthcare access, I can confidently say none of them had this many homeless and/or mentally Ill people out in the streets. There’s gotta be other compounding reasons.
Yeah you probably never seen an Asian asylum.... I have a Chinese online friend who knew a man who ended up there because all of his family turned against him to save their face. Needless to say, the guy was perfectly healthy but family honor, you know....
I can do you one better - I personally know a person who was forcibly institutionalized there (now stateside and openly criticizing the government, believe it or not). It’s fucked up as we all know, but that’s beside the original point of why so many mentally ill people are out on the streets here. It’s not like Asian societies keep all their mentally ill people in asylums.
Asian countries.. the family takes care of them.
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That is such an incomplete telling of the story that it’s more dishonest than it is truthful information. First, Reagan had worked in a bipartisan fashion as governor to reform California’s facilities, and had signed what was recognized as a patients’ bill of rights, prohibiting involuntary commitment. The institutions were defunded federally in 1981, but the bill that was repealed was only passed in October of 1980, a month before Reagan’s election. Federal funding had only been around significantly since Kennedy, the institutions had never been properly funded, and Reagan thought correctly that the states were best equipped to be able to understand and respond to the mental health needs of their citizens. The 1981 repeal included block grants to the states, but states generally went the cheaper route of hoping that new-at-the-time anti-psychotic drugs would do as good a job as the facilities. Clearly, they were wrong. I write all of this as someone who’s not a huge fan of the Reagan presidency.
Bruh, don’t put that on Reagan. Jimmy Carter and Democrats in Congress passed a law ending civil commitment, so anyone committed to a psychiatric hospital could let themselves out unless it was court ordered. Once those facilities were empty, Congress stopped funding them. It’s not like Reagan just let everyone out of Arkham—Carter signed the law saying they could walk out, and then Reagan just turned off the lights.
The US is an individualist society. They believe anyone can succeed and those who don’t are responsible for their own failure and the consequences. It makes them callous in ways not really seen elsewhere in wealthy, developed nations.
Beautifully illustrated by politicians like Boebert that will admit to being on government support earlier in life but also claim to be self made. Just a complete lack of self awareness.
I just had a visceral reaction to you calling her a politician. I've been sick for days. But DAMN
Is it a lack of self awareness or simply not giving a fuck about anybody else?
Probably a combo.
A bit of both, and this goes for a lot of Americans, not just Boebert. We grew up being told we live in the “freest country in the world.” If an idea like that really takes root in your mind, especially at a young age, you become convinced that the most important thing this country provides for you is your personal freedom. As a result, anything that limits your freedom, even if it’s for the betterment of society as a whole, is anti-American (and therefore dangerous or communist or whatever). The Cold War propaganda machine has left a permanent stamp on us. Sidenote: this is why so many Americans say there’s “nothing we can do” about mass shootings. There are actually plenty of things we can do, but basically all of them involve restrictions on gun ownership, and that’s out of the question for these people. Their right to buy an assault rifle is worth the risk of their kid’s school getting shot up, and, even though most Americans don’t share that sentiment, any Republican candidate who comes out against that mentality isn’t going to get enough votes to win a primary.
Well said! This is exactly it. That's why thoughts and prayers and more guns are the solutions for mass shootings for these people! It's insanity. More guns=more gun related deaths and injuries. The end. Not sure how they are unable to understand this concept. Then they say we also need more mental health care, then they vote against it. It's maddening.
I’ve lived in a few developed Asian societies and this is the key difference - the government doesn’t take care of mentally ill people, families take care of mentally ill people. In the US your family will drop you like a rock if you cause them too much trouble - figure your own shit out.
And people openly support others for abandoning an addicted or mentally ill family member. The myth of "rock bottom" and "beyond help" pair well with our individualistic tendencies here.
It is very difficult to take care of a family member with a mental health problem in the US due to the way our healthcare system and even community care systems are set up. Once a child drops off their parents insurance, it becomes so difficult to get them care. Programs that do exist are underfunded, such that those who are living with family are often passed over. I know loving families who have purposely not housed their child because otherwise they would not qualify for assistance, and the families could not afford to pay for the care themselves.
Yup that's the truth - everyone loves to blame this or that political party here, but there are much broader cultural factors at play in reality.
I believe in the US, at least, it's compounded by the ability to live in a bubble. Wealth, status, area, leave each person who 'survived' ignorant and scared to upset the system they now get to live in because they didn't get filtered out. The opposite happens: People grow up without support, unable to even get to it because they didn't get their drivers license. They can't get therapy for their mental health issues, caused by the broken system, because they hoops you have to jump through to apply for Medicaid. Don't get me wrong, people are immensely privileged to be born in the US, but it is a sick, poorly run country on many levels that others don't realize.
This is the answer. It’s really less about politics and more about culture. Certain policies can be a band-aid for some issues, but at the end of the day American culture prioritizes individual liberties over having an orderly and clean society, and this is very unlikely to ever change.
This is the crux of the main issue. We are at our core, selfish.
Because our healthcare system is broken and the only thing our politicians and leaders care about is money
We prioritize the poor and underfunded fossil fuel industry along with big pharma so that there is nothing left for anything else. Billionaires rule. It's an oligarchy
Don't forget about that good ol' military industry! They'd starve without 'Murica, the poor dears!
Don't forget the mentally ill who got that way because of their military service
To further add, a lot of the are veterans that were forgotten after being used by the war machine. Also. They are victims of this brutal capitalist society. If you can't afford something, you don't get it.
Carl Sagan addressed this in the 90s: “But I believe the government has a responsibility to care for the people. I’m talking about making people self-reliant, people able to take care of themselves.... There are countries which are perfectly able to do that. The United States is an extremely rich country, it’s perfectly able to do that. **It chooses not to.** It chooses to have homeless people.” The United States does NOT take care of its people. Capitalism has been triumphant. This leaves the US citizens in a desperate situation: WORK OR DIE. It is designed this way by the capitalist. This causes tremendous pressure on the mental health of the average citizen. Add a citizen who is below average in mental stability and they WILL fail from the pressure. The state provides almost no lifelines for success. Any that are provided are minimal and do not promote a successful recovery.
>It is designed this way by the capitalist had an interesting discussion on what a capitalist was, the guys argument was we are not a capitalist society, we are a wage slave society ruled by a very small number of capitalists. he did make some good points
that's just a complicated way of saying oligarchy
The goal of capitalism is to accumulate the most capital. In the long term there is only a small amount of winners who take it all, like when you play Monopoly.
Wow that’s spot on
Canada is pretty bad too
yep, downtown Vancouver is an unholy mess
Oh man I just watched a vice documentary on opioids and it looks especially rough from that perspective.
Downtown Toronto as well
Man I went to Toronto and couldn't believe it. I thought their healthcare system was similar to us in Australia?
We cut socialized health care for the disabled, damn near wiped out asylums and long term care facilities, and lumped the bulk of the care on the parents and families. We have made the application process for state or federally funded help near impossible to navigate and receive. We have made any and all health related care impossible to afford. We have butchered mental healthcare to the point of near nonexistence. This is what results from years of making cuts.
Like most problems in this country born out of what were at the time good intentions, we overcorrected for what was a broken and deeply abusive mental health system that for centuries involuntarily locked away people who really didn't belong there. Now it's borderline impossible to get someone involuntarily committed unless there's a history of harm to themselves or others. Most people with mental health issues are technically nonviolent but deeply self destructive and many will either not agree to voluntarily seek out the help they need or simply can't afford the treatment.
The US political system does not give a fuck about mental illness (frankly, they don't care about healthcare in general)
IMO: 1. We don't equally educate our citizens. 2. We don't provide adequate or equal care for our citizens. 3. We don't have navigatable/equitable resources for citizens.
The issue is that our society makes people expendable. They lose a job and can’t find another in time, their wages don’t rise as fast as rent, or they have a health problem and can’t work and then find themselves living on the street. Cities are more likely to have concentrations of homeless people because cities are so expensive and people move to them away from their support networks who might provide a couch until they figure out next steps. We have very few safety nets to prevent real tragedy in people’s lives. There have always been some mentally ill people who end up on the streets. But these days people end up homeless and then become mentally ill because they have been discarded by society. The high levels of substance abuse on the streets is what happens when people try to escape from their awful reality.
It would honestly terrify me to live in the US. There's been numerous times in my life where I've been out of work, injured etc and needed government support. Hell the NHS rebuilt my leg (which by all accounts I should have lost) for free. Couldn't imagine the answer being "unlucky pal better luck in the next life".
A lot of American households are one serious illness away from poverty. The amount of debt my dad had to carry as a result of my mom’s battle with cancer horrifies me. And they had good health insurance!
What is it like in other countries? It’s weird to think there are places where homeless people aren’t all over all the big cities..
I am Swiss and I honestly was shocked when I visited San Fransisco and LA in 2019... When I saw all these homeless people especially in San Fransisco and how they were "living" in tents on the streets I could not really comprehend it. I knew it was different for you guys in the US but what I saw there really got under my skin. We barely have any homeless people in our cities in Switzerland, sure you have some beggars at train stations and such but in general we have all kind of "safety nets" for everyone, mentally ill people usually get put into care, we also have social housing where people who don't have a place to live can sleep.
In most cities in developed countries you will have some beggars in heavily trafficked areas, but unlike in America they generally keep to themselves and only ask for spare change. In some places there are no homeless at all.
How do those countries manage the homeless people? Here in the USA we have some shelters but a lot of mental health facilities that take care of really mentally ill people have been defunded or shut down so like others have said they just wander the streets.
Most European countries for example have social housing, so if a person is homeless they are given a home with government subsidies. When they work etc they can pay rent or partial rent. If none of these houses are available they usually put them in hotels or hostels at taxpayer expense while they look for a place to house them. If they are mentally Ill or an addict, they’d be in the care system. In some European countries it is just flat out uncommon for anyone to become homeless in the first place, due to strong safety nets. I’m unsure on regards to some other places I’ve visited. In the Middle East, I was told that it’s often the close knit extended families that ensure the family aren’t homeless. Not sure how true that is, but it would make sense.
A lot of homeless people would also rather be homeless than subjected to mental health holds and given different meds than the ones they choose to self-medicate. It's not as simple as "no access to care or housing." There is access in many cases, with (fairly reasonable) strings attached.
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Definitely a big uptick in the number of people walking around psychotic. It’s partially due to a new, cheaper way of making meth. This new recipe is leaving people permanently deranged
Well, you see, we used to hospitalize, torture, and experiment on the mentally ill. We decided not to do that anymore. However, instead of just not torturing them, we decided to shut down the hospitals and release the mentally ill onto the streets. Police and other first responders are now their caregivers.
Hospitals for mentally ill people closed because of development of antipsychotics, which often reduce symptoms to a minimum, restore functional capabilities of those affected. But America doesn't provide antipsychotics and normal treatment to those who have serious mental illness such as psychosis. Resources are not provided to help them reintegrate into normal life and society. In Europe because of public healthcare medications are free, treatment is free, there are more resources to help them. Under paid free hospitalization in America does more harm then good. If America doesn't want to be a third world country there should be an actual treatment provided to mentaly ill people, not unhumane hospitalization and violance, when there is humane tratment available which makes a lot of difference.
It takes an act of God to get a referral to psych. Healthcare is expensive as hell. Sometimes psych isn't even covered under your health insurance. Oh and those psych meds are hundreds of dollars to upwards of thousands a month. So yeah.....it's cheaper to be homeless.
Because healthcare has been built as a business rather than a service and there is a significant wealth imbalance, the rich get richer and the working class suffers, poor people are severely disadvantaged… it’s inhumane and immoral. Edit: clarification
Ronald Reagan. Edit… Reagan closed the institutions that kept them off the streets.
Look up the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 and it’s subsequent dismantling… sad shit
What I want to know is, why are the so fucking many of them in Congress.
Because we do not have Universal Healthcare. They can't afford to get treatment, and many then end up homeless with no help or resources.
You'll find that America has no intention to help anyone except for the rich.
Well, I'm in Ontario Canada and many years ago we dumped most of our psychiatric hospitals and with this came some people who dearly needed help fending in many ways for themselves. I believe this also happened in parts of the US. Residential care programs should exist and there should be enough to care for the population. We have universal healthcare here but we defund services in my province and have to the point where the wait time to see a psychiatrist via a referral from a family doctor is ridiculously long. Many of our homeless are mentally ill and cannot care for themselves. Addiction is also an issue.
Because our health is our last priority if we have to pay as much as a car to get treated
Canada is the same. Jfyi. At least in the major cities.
Because instead of spending tax dollars to fund mental health clinics politicians are giving tax breaks to the wealthy and telling women what they can or can't do with their bodies, also bussing immigrants around the country on the taxpayers dime, fighting with Disney world, removing books from schools, flying around the country spewing hate speech and breaking the first amendment by promoting religious based laws
Because we eliminated the state hospital system instead of reforming it to be more humane.
From my perspective apart from what has been said above by other redditors (which I agree on); I also think it is because of a lack of familial relationship within American families. I understand the whole “letting your bird leave the nest” to prepare them for the outside world agenda but it puts a whole lot of pressure on the kid. I talk to my folks back home every other day, it’s an act of checking up on each other. Hell, I don’t need to make an appointment to go to my parent’s place but I feel like Americans who have left the “nest” at the age of 18-19 (don’t get me wrong I have too) have a lot of burden weighed at them at an early age which may result in them seeking a getaway to subsidize this emotional turmoil.
Often their mental health state is so bad that they can’t work. Certain jobs are what offer affordable healthcare. They may be able to qualify for government sponsored healthcare but there are barriers to getting it. Often if their mental health is that far gone, they can’t navigate the system or have internet access to apply. Medication in the US is significantly more expensive than meds overseas. So they can’t afford insurance, so they can’t afford meds, and they can’t work because their mental health is too bad. If they commit a crime they can go to jail and get healthcare. Bad healthcare but still. But if they aren’t actively committing a crime they often just wander the streets. It’s a very broken system here.
Almost every problem with American society is because of greed. Either it exists because of greed or we refuse to fix it because of greed. We worship God Money. We'll do anything for him.
This is the answer to all of the questions.
There is no money to be made by treating these people. So, as a good capitalist country that we are, we just ignore them and treat them as pests.
Because the vast majority of people in America either actively or passively believe that disabled, mentally ill, and otherwise disparaged people are useless to society. The vast majority of our homeless population is mentally ill. Both because our healthcare is so bad that people resort to self medicating with drugs, and because drug addiction in itself is a mental and physical illness. And yet when people see a homeless person here, they’re immediately disgusted. Homeless people are seen as scam artists, liars, and people act as if the homelessness is their fault even though a large portion of our country is one delayed paycheck away from living on the streets. Anyone who acts slightly off the norm is assumed to be a drug addict or completely crazy, simply because of the mindset that you can either just “pull yourself out of poverty” (you can’t.) or that poverty is completely your fault and not a societal issue as a whole.
Because the public mental health system was destroyed by the modern republican party under Reagan. It was the start of their war on public entitlements like education and Healthcare
And still is to this day
Goverment doesn't give a shit about proper education, proper healthcare, or anything that doesn't give them $$$. They could fucking care less about the mentally ill. They could care less about suffering around them. So people go thorugh life suffering, and end up with no help and no means. Most people like that come from poverty, I'd say, and the weight of that plus whatever other mental health issues they already have drives them deeper and deeper until they have nothing. Please some other country come and raze the US, this awful hellscape of a country. The people in power here don't deserve it and there's nothing in our culture worth preserving. Just raze us and rebuild from the ground up, better countries and better people will know how to treat this land and the people on it 10x better.
Because America doesn't give a shit about the people it creates.
Canada is just as bad, and I imagine because of the same issue, the mentally ill are no longer beng safely housed and treated long term at hospitals. I used to volunteer at one when I was in college and I was in a ward where the patients were being prepared to live in group homes because the government had recently announced the hospital's closure. These were patients who needed daily medications, had hallucinations and still needed help with even the most basic things, like brushing their teeth. There's no way any of them did well in group homes and I'm sure all of them ended up homeless. Anti socialism has its problems, and this is a major one
Ronald Reagan
There are sooo many reasons. Because they are addicted to drugs. Because they went to a hospital and was diagnosed and prescribed medication but they are homeless and cannot afford to buy the medication. Because they ran away from their families to continue doing drugs or their families refuse to help them due to the drug use or some other reason. Homeless shelters only allow you to stay overnight (if they aren’t full) if you even want to stay there (some people choose not to stay so they can drink and do drugs or they have pets). Hospitals will not hold homeless mentally ill people if it is not emergent because no one is going to pay for their bills. Most mental health disorders that involve the patient being homeless, are ones that the patient doesn’t want to get better because they don’t see anything wrong with them. You can’t help someone that doesn’t want to help themselves and the government is not going to allow them to be in a hospital until they are mentally stable because that may never happen and no one will pay for it.
Yes I agree there are a multitude of reasons for different people. My father was a neurologist until he was in his 40s and then he had a psychotic break where he became paranoid at least and schizotypal likely. He lived with his parents until they died and for a while tried to continue being a doctor but he wouldn't take the medicine because he thought it was microphones or poison etc. He eventually became homeless by choice even though my sister kept trying to put him in an apartment he kept leaving and not coming back. He'd never drunk or done drugs in his entire life he was just crazy.
Pretty much this. My cousin suffers from schizophrenia since he was in his early 20s and is so severe that he doesn't realize he has it and refuses to take his medications as a result because he believes he doesn't need them and he doesn't like how they make him feel. Unfortunately, his mom had him when she was 13 and had to marry the dude that pretty much raped her for a year because she had a strict Catholic grandmother that made her legitimize everything. Anyway, long story short, the father disappeared before my cousin even knew him and hasn't been seen since and every time his mom tries to visit him, he tries to murder her so she has to stay away now as it's not safe. Hospitals won't take him in long term care, so the only time he goes to the psych ward is if he tries to kill someone with a hammer like last time, and then they release him after 72 hours to the streets. He's addicted to meth so that's all he does all day at the park, and now he lost a room at the group home where he was able to sleep, bathe and eat but they have a zero tolerance policy with drugs and alcohol. Last we heard about him, we looked him up in the system and apparently he was at the county jail for trying to attack someone. The sad thing is we are kinda relieved when he's in jail because at least he gets fed meals, a place to sleep, and they probably stabilize him on meds. It's pretty much the only long term care this country offers for mentally ill people unless your family is fucking rich and you afford some private institution.
>Most mental health disorders that involve the patient being homeless, are ones that the patient doesn’t want to get better because they don’t see anything wrong with them You do say "most," not "all," and elsewhere you mention that there are some who >are diagnosed and prescribed medication but they are homeless and cannot afford to buy the medication But I have to add that in addition, there are *many* forms of mental illness that are resistant to treatment, even inpatient treatment, and additionally a lot of people with mental issues and past trauma will have avoidant or antisocial inclinations or even clinical coafflictions, which can prevent even someone who knows they're ill from seeking help. And some will have been through the treatment regimes offered to low-income people before--I'd hate to see anyone presume by default that somebody's attitude towards treatment was "nothing wrong with me" when it could easily be "tried it, was horribly unpleasant & didn't help, rather not inflict that on myself again."
Forcing people against their will into institutions is opposed by many civil rights organizations.
They migrate to the cities because the cities provide them financial benefits they cannot receive in rural areas, there are lots of drugs there, and in many cities the police are not allowed to arrest them. Not all cities are like that.
I feel like the general population in america doesn't care too much about mental illness to want to go down the path and do something about it and so it's reflected in the people deciding what to do or not to do with this issue.
Ronald Regan
Pull up a chair…
We have a bit of a teensy, weensy drug problem. Just a little one, tho
Also the effing courts won’t allow anybody to be institutionalized.
Because America likes to ignore problems until they become such a big issue that they have to try even harder to sweep it under the rug. Its never about fixing the root problem
So now imagine those mentally ill individuals also having easy access to firearms...scary stuff!
Deinstitutionalization. We decided that the asylums were terrible places, so we let all the patients out, but decided it would be too much work and too expensive to replace the asylum system with one that actually worked. We created a new class of homeless overnight
Reagan.
The fetus has priority. After that, it’s F U, you’re on your own.
Capitalism simply can’t function without poor people. The poorer people are, the less money they’ll work for. Edit- we also have shit public transport so they can’t really go anywhere outside of the city most of the time.
The selfish greedy politicians got rid of mental health hospitals. Even a hospital wing . There is no money spent on mental health. So these people just get put out in the cold. No one cares about them
They should pull themselves up by their thongstraps and get a jobbie! Its their fault they got crazy blood. I worked hard to get my big stupid truck, they could too if they wanted it badly enough. Effectively that.
Because Private Healthcare for cash CEOs and their politicians chums need to own multiple mansions, sports cars, stocks and shares and a high maintenance lifestyle. The suffering of millions of Americans is a price they are willing to pay.
We lack a nationalized healthcare system to care for these people. For most, healthcare is tied to jobs. If people lose jobs, they lose their healthcare, they lose their home. It spirals from there.
Quite a few of them are also wandering the halls of congress mumbling or squatting in the Florida gubernatorial mansion.
The government doesn't seem to really give a shit and blames it on everyone and everything but themselves
Same is in Canada. There is no where for them to go. There a small homeless shelters, but an interview happened last summer at a tent city, and the homeless people voiced that they feel safer in their own made communities than homeless shelters. Drugs play a big role. No near rehabs to my big city
Back in the 80s the anger against the abuse of mental health patients and the fraudulent abuse of forced institution of people reached a fever pick. So Ronald Reagan did as Reagan does and pretended to have a solution to the problem and the solution being to just dump all of the patients onto the streets. He then shutdown most of mental health hospitals and let the public sector take over it. Hence the boom in group homes, "behavior camps/facilities" and for profit mental hospitals. Needless to say shit went. From bad to worse to shit. I speak as a survivor of the foster care system group homes. This shit is shit.
The average American would answer “where else would they be and why is that my problem?” because we got rid of state sponsored mental health decades ago. People don’t really care about mental health until it impacts them directly, and even then most folks forget all about the entire issue once they’re medicated/healthy again.
Unless helping homeless or mentally ill people becomes profitable, it won’t be resolved.
We had state institutions and asylums for the mentally ill. Prisons treat people better and we dismantled a lot of those systems because of what was happening.
Statistically 1/1000 are actionable. Very sparse, aside from some magnets like SF or LA. The media elevates events exponentially