It seems so simple. So basic of an idea that you wonder why it has not been implemented yet.
It is involuntary care.
As communities across the province grapple with street disorder and a sense of insecurity, involuntary care is seen by many as a solution. Politicians of all stripes have offered it up to concerned residents and businesses as a path forward.
The problem is it is unlikely to be what people are expecting. The expectation is that it will be a panacea; the reality will be quite different.
Nobody thinks involuntary care will fix anything except having to see homeless people. The people advocating for involuntary care know what they’re doing and they’re despicable. If this doesn’t work they’ll just send them to jail.
They also know that involuntary care and jails are MORE expensive than housing. They don’t care. Suffering is the point.
Used to be that mentally ill and addicted people could still afford cheap (flop) housing.
The problem of homelessness is caused by property owners, investors and government policy - not by its victims.
Involuntary addiction treatment can be helpful at times - sometimes required of physicians, and pilots with substance use problems with great success.
But punishing the poor is just a distraction from the fact that we have homelessness just so landlords can keep raising your rent.
Sometimes I think this homeless class of people is supposed to be an ever present threat. If you don’t want to engage with the capitalist economy, then you end up on the street, seen as less than by the majority of society.
You have to want to recover from addiction. If you have any kind of mental disorder, you have to want to be treated.
Both of these things are true but are unlikely to be solved with people living on the street or bunched up in dirty SROs in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver.
Riverside Hospital should be expanded to house multiple layers of homeless and mentally ill patients, each layer needs to be handling different issues.
Those who are down on their luck and managed to become homeless but dont have the means to get back to secure housing, they should be given training if needed and social workers to get them out of the provided housing and reintroduced into the work force.
A layer of the system should work on those with substance abuse issues, with therapy and withdrawal support then work them into the above layer.
Those with mental issues that can be treated with higher levels of therapy until moving them out into the housing and training layer.
Those with harder to treat mental issues should be held in stricter care that may have to be involuntary. This involuntary care should be under peer review regularly to make sure people aren’t being put in this care unnecessarily but there is a segment of people that cannot safely be out in the world through no fault of their own.
We as a society need to pay for these kinds of care because the cost of not doing it is too high, in lives lost and safety of the people living on the street.
It should also be said that companies and employers should be paying more to their employees and as taxes to keep people out of poverty as that is what can lead to more people on the streets.
It’s really just institutionalization by another name. While homeless people are in involuntary care, the people who don’t want them around will have their wish, and from their point of view, having the homeless cycle back into the system within a few months of release is a feature, not a bug. It doesn’t actually do anything to curb substance abuse, but it isn’t really meant to.
Anyone with any experience with addiction understands that the desire to beat it has to come from within the addicted or it won’t stick.
Addiction is one side of it. Another side is severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Unfortunately, the story for this one is quite tragic. The medications we have, antipsychotics, are effective at treating the symptoms but they come with heavy side effects that get worse over time. This means a lot of people stop taking their medication because they don’t want to deal with the side effects anymore.
It seems nobody has a good solution, just disjointed efforts. The only hope I see for changing the creation of people that end up homeless Is early support for abused people, and mental health care for free, so that future generations have better chances of avoiding drugs as a coping mechanism for their demons.
To the articles: There seems to be a point where the drugs in society have become so addictive that it ~100% removes the persons ability to make healthy choices for themselves, and removes joy from life- other than the drug.
It seems to make logical sense to move the people suffering to involuntary care. We bring physically injured people to hospital and perform life saving surgeries on those that are too injured to refuse treatment choices.
As compassionate humans we take injured wild animals against their will and force them into treatment so they can live a proper life, so we try to do the same with our fellow humans.
Maybe its the wrong approach, but the other non barrier methods don’t appear to be working.
It seems to make logical sense to move the people suffering to involuntary care. We bring physically injured people to hospital and perform life saving surgeries on those that are too injured to refuse treatment choices.
I think you’re making a false equivalence. If you’re brought unconscious to emergency after a motor vehicle collision, the docs can legally presume you’d consent to life-saving interventions and give you them before you’re conscious. Once you’re awake, you’re free to decline treatment and leave the hospital. That could be within 24 hours.
Involuntary treatment for substance use probably means 1 to 3 months of involuntary care: not being able to leave a hospital unit, and having most ‘resistance’ to medical treatment or the hospitalization interpreted as hostility and/or inability to care for oneself (in some eye’s justifying ongoing involuntary detention).
Hospitalization is pretty indignifying. If you’re on board with the treatment plan, you accept it. If you’re there against your will, it feels less like healthcare and more like prison (including for the healthcare staff). From my experience of caring for people involuntarily admitted to hospital for mental health reasons - the experience is more traumatizing for them than it is a foundation to improve their lives. Addiction is a social problem; it needs a social fix: Housing, counseling, employment opportunities are far more needed than medical care.
I also don’t believe any drug is 100% addictive. The more stress and trauma and fewer resources and alternative sources of relaxation a person has access to - the more susceptible they are to addiction. These underlying factors are what we need to treat. The only reason involuntary care is popular amongst some politician-types isn’t because it’s effective, it’s because it aligns with their neoliberal values and they don’t care about effectiveness. Money for involuntary care would be better spent treating (eg, Housing First) and preventing homelessness
They have proved that meth destroys the dopamine system so the only way you feel pleasure in life is meth.
Recovered people have suggested it takes years for the brains reward syatem to reset. A meth addict is not able to make proper choices for their future quality of life. Oxy seems similar, and add deadly drugs cut into that you have immenent death waiting.
I’m not saying involuntary care is the answer, I’m saying it seems like the answer when you follow logic reasoning, thus why people are for it.
