Honestly spoken like someone who hasn’t been homeless or is close to anyone who has been homeless. A lot of people are severely mentally unwell and do not want shelter.
And the complicating factor is the percentage of people like this depends on the city! Eg Utah’s approach to homelessness probably won’t work for Oregon.
I have spent my entire life around the homeless, in a city that has a universal shelter mandate. I’ve also spent the better part of a decade volunteering in food pantries and community kitchens.
> A lot of people are severely mentally unwell and do not want shelter.
No. What they don’t want is to be corralled like livestock into shared living spaces, with no privacy or protection for their property. That’s not because they’re mentally ill; it’s because it’s degrading. Give mentally ill people the choice of dignity and they will overwhelmingly choose it.
> Give mentally ill people the choice of dignity and they will overwhelmingly choose it.
The one's flashing their genitals and screaming at strangers?
The definition of "mentally ill homeless" is surely nuanced and varied, by this archetype is certainly what a lot of people are going to think of when they hear the term. It's hard for me to imagine degradation is relevant to them.
Emphasis on "overwhelmingly." One of the most pernicious problems in homeless advocacy is that the average person only remembers their worst encounters with mentally ill homeless people, not the tens of thousands of people who they've silently passed on the street.
That feels intentionally misleading though. If I ask you about the severely mentally unwell, and you refer to a guy with heavy depression while there's observable examples of people in literal states of lunacy, you may be technically correct, but obviously you will be misunderstood.
These aren't the "severely mentally ill" that the comment intended imo.
I'm not following. Here's the claim, as I interpreted it:
"Many homeless people do not want shelter because they are mentally ill."
Here's how I responded: first, there just aren't that many mentally unwell homeless people in the "naked and screaming" sense. Second, that those who are mentally unwell, to whatever degree, do not accept forms of shelter not because of that illness but because those forms of shelter are, by normal standards, extremely degrading. We would never dream of asking someone who hasn't otherwise been dehumanized to willingly subject themselves to constant surveillance, a living space shared with desperate strangers, and the complete absence of any guarantees around the security of their private property.
Put another way: being homeless doesn't make you lose your sense of dignity. Being mentally ill doesn't either, except in the worse cases. Treating the overwhelming majority like they're criminal timebombs is dehumanizing and just doesn't match the facts on the ground.
So again: what's being missed here? I'm interested in the 99% case, which includes a very large number of mentally ill homeless people. I'm not engaging in the 1% case, because I think it's a frivolous diversion from the needs of a great many suffering people.
It's not a caricature. These people are easy to find in many cities. They're not uncommon sights, even if they don't resemble the average homeless person.
The question was about the "severely mentally ill".
If the counterpoint is that it's rude to acknowledge the people who seem to be utterly insane, well I think that's kind of shit. If it's that these aren't the people we're referring to when we say "severely mentally ill", then I think that's just disingenuous.
A person can be severely mentally ill in many ways, not all of them are highly public and immediately offensive to passers by. So while the people you describe would indeed fall into that category, many readers would likely place other people with debilitating mental illnesses into that category as well.
That's true, but someone who is severely mentally ill in an invisible way is not going to be categorized as such by a passerby, so it's an obviously semantic ambiguity. Saying what is technically true but not understood is just distracting.
That's not necessarily true either. Someone who is catatonic might be noticed by a passerby but doesn't scream "this person isn't safe to have in a shelter".
From this comment and below (and 99% vs 1% claim; I've heard very different numbers on addiction and debilitating mental illness), would you, or other people in the industry support my, "Housing First, OR ELSE" approach? Give homeless people SRO style housing with private rooms, purpose-built. No support, no wrap-around services - just housing and maybe food. They can stay there forever, or move out if they get it together. If the problem is really lack of dignity/etc., "99%" should accept it and get it together, right?
On the flip side, if you get housing, or refuse housing, and still commit violent/property crimes (/especially/ against your SRO mates, to ensure the housing quality is not compromised) - it's speedily prosecuted and you go to jail with 3-strike-style escalating penalties.
In my view it would solve homelessness in a few years, housing people between SROs (99%?) and jails (1%?). That is if entire billion-dollars-combined homeless budgets could be redirected to SRO construction.
And the complicating factor is the percentage of people like this depends on the city! Eg Utah’s approach to homelessness probably won’t work for Oregon.