In another thread on the topic of homelessness, it was said more than once that giving the poor housing and/or other support was pretty much addressing the symptoms instead of the disease itself, and that it would be better if instead we got at the root cause or causes of homelessness.
Is there a consensus on what the root cause(s) might be?
If so, what is stopping us from addressing this and solving the problem of homelessness?
If the root cause(s) cannot be properly addressed because society will not take the necessary steps to do so, is it still wrong to treat the symptoms instead of the disease?
I’m ignorant on the subject at large, but I would hazard these;
Poor family structure and instability, with a touch of education and drug use (lack of financial discipline), Upbringing and
Lack of awareness, but I am basing this on anecdote. I never, ever see advertisements or awareness campaigns for homelessness and I live in Chicago where I see a lot of homeless, if there are there, they are ineffective or not pronounced enough.
3.)Absolutely not wrong, treating the symptoms of the disease may be palliative at worst, and sustaining at best but it is the next best thing to do if the underlying cause cannot be addressed. Sure, #2 may only bring upon more of this “treatment” but it’s at least a start.
Being homeless seems to be the most severe of all social welfare problems, if you got to the point of being homeless, no matter who you are, chances are something really went awry and you need and deserve help, you are mentally ill (which can be countered), or you have had poor education on how to maintain your personal economy etc… Whatever the cause, if something has happened where you quite literally hit rock-bottom, you need and deserve help. Homelessness is not something we can stand idly by and debate about, like welfare programs or the like where other options can be availble, no, this is dire need because without help, the homeless would perish much sooner than later. Having homeless is a massive failure of society at large.
Not trying to be pious or anything, because of course I don’t always give when I can, but the amount of people who just drive on by irritates me. “Oh, they’ll just use it on booze” is the stupidest thing ever. If one is homeless, they have nothing else! If they don’t have that drink, they could possibly die if severely addicted, or worse… they will be homeless and bored… no pick me up or something to ease the mental turmoil they are in, just stewing in misery. Thats cruelty.
(yes I know this is strange coming from a conservative, and is counter to what I think about welfare programs, but that actually is a different subject in my eyes)
Homelessness is like cancer - there’s not one root cause, and while you can prevent some types, and treat some of the symptoms, there is currently no 100% successful cure.
What I find extremely interesting is how widely the per capita homeless rates vary by State.
For example, the state with the lowest rate of homeless is Mississippi (81 per 100,000). That’s very odd, because they also have the highest poverty rate!
A lot of people cite mental illness and drug addiction as a primary cause of homelessness. If that’s the case, does that mean Mississippi residents are vastly mentally healthier than Hawaiians, by a factor of 5? Something else has to explain the huge variation we see.
I would speculate that the line between homeless and poverty is very much a factor of cost of living. You can be very poor (poverty) in Mississippi and still afford a home. Whereas in Hawaii, New York, California, the cost of having a home is so much higher. So that the same level of poverty results in homelessness in those states.
I’ve heard conservative critiques of California that blame burdensome regulations that prevent new houses from being built. Not enough new houses are being built to keep up with population growth.
Transitional homelessness, where people lose their apartment and can’t find another place to stay, is generally not long-term. Mothers with children are usually the ones who get re-housed the quickest.
If you mean chronic, long-term homelessness, where they are sleeping in shelters or cardboard boxes or transient camps…
The major cause of that kind of homelessness is schizophrenia and/or substance addiction.
There is no reliable cure for either schizophrenia or addiction.
Cite. From 50-90% of those who undergo rehab for alcohol or drug abuse relapse, and somewhere around half within a year. The chronically homeless are those who tend to cycle in and out of rehab, and the more often one goes thru rehab, the less likely recovery becomes.
3. Treating the symptoms is a short-term solution. They lose their apartment because of drinking or schizophrenia and live on the streets. Get them off the streets, get them back on medications, get them cleaned up and into housing. Then they lose the housing because they drink or won’t take their meds.
I suppose we could, as a society, define homelessness as ‘being a danger to oneself’ and thus involuntarily commit them to some kind of institution. Is that a solution?
I wouldn’t read too much into variation by state. In some states, the preferred method for “fixing” homelessness is to put them all on a bus to somewhere just over the state line. That’s great for getting your state’s numbers down, but it doesn’t actually solve anything, and probably makes a number of problems worse.
You also have to take into account climate (as in, meteorological climate, not political climate). To a large extent, Hawaii has the most homeless because they can. In most parts of the country, if you try living like the homeless do in Hawaii, you’ll be dead within a year.
There are programs around here designed to help veterans who are homeless or close to it, and I see them advertised a fair bit (usually the ads are on the backs of buses, for whatever reason). I don’t see much about programs for non-veteran homeless, but then again, I’m not the target market for those. The people who work with such programs know where the camps are, and where people go for meals, and so on, and go there to get the word out.
One of the biggest roadblocks to effectively treating schizophrenia is that it’s one of the mental illnesses with the lowest rates of self-awareness of the illness (anosognosia) - with 97% of the sufferers experiencing at least some impaired ability to understand that they’re mentally ill and that the hallucinations and delusions aren’t real. When people don’t realize they’re ill, which happens about half the time in bi-polar illness too, it’s very difficult to keep them on medication. And even if you can medicate them, a lot of people don’t respond to the medications strongly enough to make them what we’d consider functional adults, anyway.
Until we find ways to treat serious mental illness much more effectively than we do now, we’re always going to have people who slip through the cracks because they’re neither able to take care of themselves, or being adequately looked after by others. Right now the only way to keep them off the streets is to put them in institutions as Shodan suggested - is that something society is okay with going back to?
The good news is that because of anti-psychotic drugs these institutions don’t have to be as bad as they use to be. Maybe something like a dorm that has nurses working there that makes sure everybody takes their medication. The biggest problem seems to be maintenance because schizophrenics don’t take their prescriptions.
Treatable mental illnesses can present a sticky moral dilemma, too. Suppose that a patient has a mental illness which can be 100% treated with ongoing medication. Now suppose that, while medicated, the patient prefers their medicated mental state… but while not medicated, prefers their non-medicated mental state. Do you force the unmedicated patient to go on the meds, on the grounds that it’s what they “really want”, or do their rights while unmedicated trump that?
That’s the kind of catch-22 that leads to revolving door homelessness.
As long as they take their meds, they are fine and not homeless. Since they are fine, they get released. Then they stop taking their meds and become homeless. So we re-institutionalize them, whereupon they start taking their meds again and become fine again. So they get released. Lather, rinse, repeat.
So we would need to institutionalize them because they will become homeless in the future. Even if they are fine now.
The idea behind de-institutionalizing was they could be released as long as there was follow-up to insure they would take their meds. And that kind of follow-up is not straightforward - they may not show up for their appointments to take their meds, so you have to track them down, which isn’t easy because they wandered off or are panhandling in a different spot or they got busted for something or they thought they were fine and didn’t need the medicine anymore. Or their illness is in incomplete remission, and they think the doctors are CIA agents who kidnap them and force-feed them drugs, so they hide.
Some problems can’t be fixed. Or at least they don’t have simple, apparently straightforward answers.
Generally speaking, homelessness happens to people when they are financially and situationally vulnerable. The factors that make people vulnerable in that sense vary considerably, and it is a massive mistake to make sweeping generalizations that presume they all have judgment problems, mental problems, or attitude problems.
In the short term, nearly anyone can be rendered temporarily homeless: your car, wallet, and phone are stolen in the countryside at 9 PM and the complete strangers in the houses you walk up to won’t open the door to talk to you. But you’d be able to extract yourself from that situation pretty quickly.
Many families are one paycheck away from not being able to pay the rent. They run credit card debts and pay the minimum on them each month, they feel like they have plenty to spend on gas and food and entertainment, they dress well, they’re in good health. But then the primary wage earner falls down a flight of steps and breaks a kneecap, the rotten employer illegally terminates the job, and the rotten insurance company claims the policy had expired due to nonpayment of premiums. They stay afloat for a couple months but immediately needed treatments are paid off with what was to be the rent money, the other employed person is laid off for showing up late or intermittently due to trying to take care of the injured partner, and the rotten landlord not only starts eviction proceedings but also illegally shuts off the electricity. They go live in a motel, thinking an attorney friend of theirs will quickly get the police to force the landlord to knock it off, but things get complicated and the motel rates plus eating out devastate their remaining capital. Their extended family is less helpful than they’d expected and they wear out their welcome and six months later they’re no longer allowed to sleep on sister’s or mom’s couches and they’re homeless.
Everyone talks about the mentally ill. Let’s go there. Joe has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He has a mediocre job. He once had a better job, at Citibank, but during the episode that got him diagnosed he exhibited a behavior that made the bank think he was a bad idea and although they didn’t fire him immediately they never viewed him as truly competent again, and laid him off. Joe has been assigned a new psychiatrist at the mental health facility. They don’t get along too splendidly. New psychiatrist wants to change Joe’s meds to a pharmaceutical Joe was on once before, and he didn’t like the side effects. He takes the prescribed meds for a couple weeks but again hates the side effects and argues with the shrink, who writes down “treatment resistant” and some other clinical terms in Joe’s chart. The psychiatrist reluctantly dispenses a small trial supply of a different medication and a prescription he can fill if it works for him. When the trial supply runs out, Joe goes to the pharmacy but they don’t have that medication in stock. His insurance gives him limited options for where he can fill prescriptions and his mediocre job doesn’t give him a lot of flexibility for running around to other pharmacies. His mind has a rebound effect when the medication leaves his system making him hot-tempered and argues with a pharmacist who calls the cops and they take him in. Psychiatrist confirms he’s been treatment resistant and problematic and he’s kept in a locked-ward setting for long enough to lose his job and get behind in his rent. He has no savings and the situation stresses him out further and he doesn’t plan well and loses his apartment.
I would be very curious about how the rate of homelessness is measured and calculated. For example, I know that in my town in Mississippi, we don’t have much in the way of shelter space or official services for the homeless. There are churches and some other service organizations that do something on a small scale, but many homeless people are either squatting in abandoned houses or living in the woods (which it is possible to do year-round in this part of the country). They may just plain not be on anybody’s radar.
And has already been brought up, some places make it painfully hard to be homeless, even to the point of rounding them up and dropping them on another place’s doorstep.
With respect to Mississippi probably the cost of housing is close to the lowest in the country. So if you ask can you rent housing on the minimum wage with no government assistance in Mississippi the answer is very likely to be yes. If you ask that question in California the answer is probably going to be no.