That’s a good point. On the other hand, if you ask the people who actually work in these shelters, you will find that they feel that the government should be doing more, and that they should be doing less.
I won’t argue with you about caffeine addiction, but the diagnostic criteria for depressive disorders are specifically tailored to take into account the fact that everybody gets a little depressed every once in a while. In order to merit a diagnosis of clinical depression, someone has to be depressed for an abnormal or disproportionate length of time, or have their functioning abnormally affected by their depression.
This is entirely correct.
It’s been said that all organizations always have an agenda outside of their stated one – namely the survival and success of the organization. This is as true of the homeless “industry” as anything else. Rarely will a social worker say that what someone needs is not more and better social services; rarely will a faith-based charity say that what someone needs is not more and better Jesus.
I eventually came to the conclusion that most of the people involved in helping the homeless, while consciously and sincerely wanting to help people, were also unconsciously and even more powerfully invested in helping the homeless their way, validating their beliefs and themselves as Good People. (And yes, that included me.)
Almost 10% of the adult population is considered depressed in any given year.
http://www.the-bright-side.org/site/thebrightside/content.php?type=1%20�ion_id=622&id=284#facts
And before someone chimes in that 10% is less than half, read the full original quote again.
Exactly. Even if charities do a better job than government of dealing with Problem X, in the lives of the people that they have the resources to help, the fact is that their resources only cover some people.
For the rest (to make this plain), the choice isn’t between a so-so government program and a great charity program - it’s between a so-so government program and nothing.
How about this formulation: in counseling a homeless person, it’s important to focus on their capacity to change their own lives, while being honest about the specific obstacles they will face in doing so.
But if one is planning an attack on the overall problem of homelessness, one must focus on the factors working against the homeless (or the factors that cause people to descend into homelessness in the first place), and figure out how one is going to mitigate those factors.
Then when you get to counseling the homeless, there should be fewer specific obstacles that they must face, or you will have made them less challenging, and the empowering effect of your counseling will be more successful, simply because reality won’t fight back quite as hard.
As you no doubt know, depression comes in varying levels of severity, just like many other diseases and conditions. Dealing with a severe case of a condition can be quite different from dealing with a milder case, and the same coping strategies aren’t guaranteed to work for both.
It’s kinda like our Ragdoll cat, Mattie. When my wife holds and pets her, she purrs and preens like RT posting to you. When I do the exact same thing, she claws and hisses like RT posting to me.
Ah, I understand now. You are under the impression that a complete and total hijack is “the exact same thing” as an intelligent, on-topic post.
When you think you are doing “the exact same thing” as your wife with the cat, you’re probably stepping on the cat’s tail, or jamming your finger in its ear, or something similar. I realize the distinction is subtle, but if you pay close attention, you may be able to suss it out.
Of course, a more sensible approach would be for you to stop picking up the cat, and stop hijacking threads. But that’ll happen the day after every kid in the world gets a pony for Christmas.
For a few days after the first of the month, the library smells a hell of a lot better. That’s because Rodney and his buddies hole up in cheap hotels with their liquor hauls from the checks they get. They only last a few days. I don’t know that they’d last so much longer if housing were cheaper - my gut feeling is that they’d spend the extra on the liquor and drugs and blowjobs, not the room. Obviously I don’t know, though.
I think you’re wrong in this.
This link discusses deinstitutionalization, which I certainly agree went too far. The graph demonstrates that the largest part of deinstitutionalization occurred before 1980, and was a response to new psychotropic medications and a welfare system that in theory could deliver them to people outside of an institutional setting.
Needless to say, this was a failure, since it could not guarantee that patients recieved proper care or took their medications. Furthermore, this problem was reflected not only in the growing homeless population but also in the growing prison population.
While Reagan certainly had a hand in this, this problem started before his watch and was caused by lots of factors.
OK, I had the timeline off by about 10 years. Sorry. I appreciate your concession that “Reagan certainly had a hand in this”, though. Is there anything else in my contention that you object to?
That may be true, but it supports the point that the government doesn’t care what St. Vincent de Paul wants. St. Vincent de Paul wants the government to at least allow them to run their homeless shelter, and they are being given a hard time even about that. No matter how many people wish that the government would do more, then government is going to do what it does best…tiptoe a line between giving lip service to addressing problems and actually addressing them, try to keep the voters happy, and waste a lot of money putting bandaids on problems instead of solving them.
OK, but what’s changed since the early 1970s? Have a lot of people just started making worse decisions for no particular reason? Or have the blowjobs gotten more irresistable? Or was there just as great a homelessness problem in 1973 as there was by 1983, but nobody thought it was worth commenting on in 1973?
As someone who remembers that era, I find that last one hard to believe. In the words of Al Capp, there were Students [who were] Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything. They protested Attica, and they’d have protested about homelessness. Instead, they were protesting, in the words of Paul Stookey, “people livin’ with rats and stuff the papers wouldn’t cover” rather than homelessness.
What does this thread have to do with the 1970s? Or blowjobs? Or Al Capp? As the thread monitor, you have a duty to keep things in line. 
How do you feel about something like San Francisco’s Care Not Cash program, in which homeless people get vouchers for services (such as housing or mental-health care) instead of checks? In theory, they can’t exchange these for liquor, drugs, and blowjobs, though in reality I’m sure some of them manage. This program (which I think is a great idea, as long as the services are actually available for the homeless) is designed to make it easier for homeless people to make better choices. Of course, it doesn’t work if there is no housing available for homeless people, and it probably doesn’t work nearly as well if the available housing is far away from where homeless people would want to go to panhandle.
*But me, I expected it to happen, I knew he’d lost control
When he built a fire on Main Street, and shot it full of holes. *
I’d be fine with it, but I know they’d somehow get a bottle of cheap liquor out of it. I do believe that something like that might salvage a few people, and that would make it worthwhile were it efficiently run. Seriously - Evil Hat Lady now is a productive member of society. She isn’t just not making my life miserable - she’s adding to the economy, making everybody else’s life better. I swear, I’ll pay for her medication myself if the free clinic won’t. It would be worth it.
Do you want a list?
Your point about the loss of SRO housing is very well taken, but is only part of the picture.
First of all, please note from my cite that the early 1970s marked the time of very rapid deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The impact of this on the homeless population has been much discussed.
Secondly, you were living in cities in the '70s, weren’t you? In NYC, just to use an example, Alphabet City had hundreds of abandoned buildings housing squatters. These days the area is gentrifying rapidly - a trend that has been happening in cities for better than twenty years.
You might not see a homeless person if he’s living in a basement, but you will if he’s living on a steam grate.
Lastly, those drugs your classmates took recreationally didn’t hook everyone, but a percentage of people did get addicted to various substances. This problem was smaller in 1970 as well, wasn’t it? No crack, no meth, weaker heroin? But the groundwork was laid for far bigger problems ahead.
So the homeless problem was less visible in 1973, sure. But everything was in place for it to get lots worse fast.
I should have said “commit to, to the extent allegedly necessary to fix the problem, because not enough people are willing to commit”. If that is any clearer.
So, if I understand your figgerin’, a little more than half the sample were actually homeless, and 23% of the total sample were minor children.
So a bit over 12% are minor children who are homeless. Or to put it another way, an overwhelming majority of the truly homeless are not homeless because of anyone else.
Right, but we were talking about people who were actually homeless. So your figure was overstated by quite a bit.
Well, we’ve gone from 41% down to 12.4% Progress!
Not to speak for CM, but most people assume that adults are responsible for themselves. So, if you wind up homeless because you are a chronic drunk, many people would agree that you are responsible for your homelessness.
Schizophrenia is more of a gray area. They tend to fall in between - considered responsible enough that we don’t compel them to take their medications, but not responsible for the consequences if they don’t.
So you don’t think that we should concentrate on doing things that work instead of those that don’t?
Assume, in other words, that government agencies are demonstrably better in addressing homelessness. Would you agree that the reponse to this knowledge should be a major increase in funding for private homeless agencies? Now flip it. Make any difference?
Well, this is a strawman and the fallacy of the excluded middle, obviously. A better analogy would be, “Well, there is a brief grease fire on my stovetop. Better call the fire department, and do nothing personally until they arrive, And darn those conservatives for not having one fire truck for every house in the city. We need to raise taxes.” 
Right, like I said - you aren’t willing to do much beyond contributing your discards.
So that part about how you wouldn’t mind paying an extra percent or so was not serious - you are assuming that everyone else should pay for it.
Regards,
Shodan