I work in the field, and genuinely wonder what you think the solution is? The most visible individuals suffering from chronic mental illness and often chronic homelessness frequently don’t voluntarily engage any kind of help, whether that’s medication, housing, income, etc. When people are brought inpatient involuntarily, they may be legally mandated to take medication, and we often see their level of functioning improve significantly over time, but their insight doesn’t, and they stop meds as soon as they leave and fall back into the same pattern.
I doubt it will be anything more than drugging people to make babysitting them easier.
This is why we don’t lock up “the shirtless man shouting in the street” the first place.
We used to lock that guy up, and the places we put them were horrific. In the 70s, American society collectively decided it was better to let them back out on the street than to risk locking up sane people against their will.
Its a dilemma. We either funnel them into a horrific, underfunded system (our government will not realistically produce anything better), probably also catching a few sane people in the system along the way, or we let “the shirtless man shouting on the street” stay on the street.
But he’s on his own since so many inpatient mental health facilities and beds were taken away nationwide when bad conditions were revealed during the 1970s.
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