I am working on homework, and thinking how nice it would be to be a kept woman who did not have to give a presentation tomorrow on mental illness and the homeless
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Lots of people do! You don't meet those crazy people, though, at least not mid-delusion on the bus. Some people do actually get "care in the community". They don't wind up homeless.
The problem is how to enforce such a thing for the people who aren't already being taken care of. Who is responsible for the 60-year-old bipolar who kills her own child mid-delusion and outlives her parents? What about the kid who has such severe PTSD out of foster care that he can't hold a job? Or the schizophrenic father who has a schizophrenic son? Pre-1963, they would have lived in institutions for life. Now, as you of course know, they live in bus stations between short-term hospitalizations.
I don't know how we can help them, short of returning to widespread institutionalization, and I don't see that happening, for the aforementioned cost and civil liberties reasons.
Sadly, there will always be those people who need to be institutionalized, either for their own safety or ours. The civil liberties pendulum has swung too far the other way if we can't even lock up the ones who are just plain incurably, unalterably nuts. It's sad that the combination of budget cuts, historical human rights violations, and communities so big/transient/uncaring/whatever-the-hell-has-happened-to-us puts so many of these people on the street (in between those short-term hospitalizations or stints in jail) with zero resources available to them.
We have a fairly awesome local homeless shelter that handles so much more than that it's almost unfair to call it a homeless shelter. Part of the awesomeness is that a local hospital donates case workers and nurses to work right on location there. Another part is that they keep building apartments and semi-supervised group housing units for those folks who will just never live independently.
Who is responsible? We are. All of us. That's why places like this, places that do the job so much better (IMO, of course) than any government program, need our support.
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The problem is how to enforce such a thing for the people who aren't already being taken care of. Who is responsible for the 60-year-old bipolar who kills her own child mid-delusion and outlives her parents? What about the kid who has such severe PTSD out of foster care that he can't hold a job? Or the schizophrenic father who has a schizophrenic son? Pre-1963, they would have lived in institutions for life. Now, as you of course know, they live in bus stations between short-term hospitalizations.
I don't know how we can help them, short of returning to widespread institutionalization, and I don't see that happening, for the aforementioned cost and civil liberties reasons.
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However interesting things are happening: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/story/1007813.html
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Who is responsible? We are. All of us. That's why places like this, places that do the job so much better (IMO, of course) than any government program, need our support.
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