Seriously… No hyperbole, I’d imagine the majority of people that would enthusiastically vote for trump in this next electron after he led a violent insurrection to try to end American democracy (and had actual discussed plans for the military to shoot American civilians if the overthrow were successful and there was an opposition movement) actively suffer from a listed disorder and are in need of treatment.
While this might be an important tool to help many who need it, I can't help but wonder if this essentially criminalizes opting out of capitalism. Anyone that is homeless and uses drugs or has a mental illness can now be involuntarily committed, denying them the right to decide on that sort of life.
I have no idea. I'm not suggesting people often become homeless because of ideological reasons, however many do opt out of the rat race and choose not to work and participate economically, which is functionally equivalent.
there is a difference between opting out of the rat race and screaming obscenities at people, defecating on the street, while strewing garbage everywhere.
Maybe not capitalism in name but some vague idea of “the system”. The system that raised rents and lowered their wages and forced them into homelessness, and continually punishes them for being so. Addiction and other anti-social behaviors could be an act of rebellion against the pressures of this system. Not all of those pressures are capitalistic, some are just basic requirements for any society, but a large chunk of them are.
Opting out of capitalism does not give you the right to set up shanty towns in public spaces, or leave needles and feces all over the place. This law is necessary to give our public spaces back to everyone.
We've criminalized merely existing in public spaces for too long, and I'm not aware of viable and accessible alternatives if one cannot afford shelter.
One need not leave needles and feces about to be committed under this law.
I'm troubled by the stereotypes regarding homeless people being promoted in this thread.
The new law, which reforms the state’s conservatorship system, expands the definition of “gravely disabled” to include people who are unable to provide themselves basic needs such as food and shelter due to an untreated mental illness or unhealthy drugs and alcohol use. Local governments say current state laws leave their hands tied if a person refuses to receive help.
The law is designed to make it easier for authorities to provide care to people with untreated mental illness or addictions to alcohol and drugs, many of whom are homeless.
I work in mental health in another state, and I’ve been wishing for a law like this since I started my career. I don’t believe people who have any sort of mental illness should be forced into treatment, but laws enacted at the behest of rights groups for the mentally ill have gone too far (although it’s certainly better that we have those laws than don’t). Some people are so sick they’re their own insurmountable obstacle to care, and that would be fine if their condition only affected them, but it often doesn’t. For their sakes and that of those around them, I agree some people should be forced to get their issues treated.
I have a nosy neighbor that also happens to be a social worker. She made my life hell last year by getting cops involved in a situation that didn’t necessitate them, and additionally forced me to go through all sorts of hoops and psychological examinations to prove my state of mind. This law, despite it’s good intentions, makes me super nervous after having gone through that BS
But the witches actually exist in this scenario. If you’ve spent any time living on the west coast over the past decade, you’ve surely seen these people with uncontrolled mental illness roaming the streets and causing havoc.
What sort of solution would you propose for people so deep into mental illness that they can’t or won’t get themselves out if it? Demanding that they continue living on the streets isn’t a very humane solution either.
What is havoc to you? I live in San Francisco and the homeless and addicts don’t really bother people outside of them existing , which does seem to bother a lot of people. They do shoplift and car break ins are pretty common but it’s not like they’re running around brandishing knives. Most of them are opiate addicts, and you aren’t aggressive or chaotic on heroine.
I agree we need more mental health and addiction treatment but you can’t force people into it. If someone is in pain and don’t see a reason to live outside of drugs, locking them up won’t fix that. Either you keep them there forever or they’ll relapse as soon as they get out. We need to address the societal issues causing this instead of the band aid solution of detainment.
It’s a city of 10 million people , crazy fucked up shit is bound to happen, homeless people or not. Here in SF a tech CEO stabbed another CEO multiple times and left them in the streets, you don’t see us trying to detain CEOs.
I don’t see the point in arguing about this. You said they mostly keep to themselves, maybe a little pretty crime here and there (as if even that is okay)… That has NOT been my experience and I brought one especially-egregious receipt to make my point. The other poster who mentioned clapped-out RVs and catalytic converter theft must also be from LA.
We could argue anecdotes and experiences back and forth and get nowhere, or we could look at the data. According to the LAPD 8% of crimes involved homeless people. This includes cases where either the victim or the suspect is homeless. The article also states that they are more likely the victim then the perpetrator so we can cut that down to ~3% are the suspects of crime. Also considering that homeless are often falsely accused or scapegoated that is still probably a high guess for actual perpetrators.
That’s ~3% of crime, considering your also in general not likely to be a victim of crime the odds you are a victim of a crime committed by a homeless person is very low. Not 0 so you’ll get lurid stories like the one you posted on the local news, but still low.
The tactic of citing the most horrific news story about an individual in a group of people has long been used to demonize people of color. Some news agencies realize they can’t do this anymore so they’re shifting to a new marginalized group that just so happens to be composed of mostly people of color.
My mother-in-law was disabled for years before she died and required the use of a scooter to travel more than about 50 feet. We have sidewalks here that are completely impassable due to the tents and accumulated junk from our unhoused population. But disabled people can suck it, amirite?
LAPD doesn’t do anything about it, and everyone here knows they do everything in their power to avoid so much as filing a report, much less making arrests. Maybe their statistics are technically correct but they are not at all representative of the lawless landscape that is the streets of LA.
You imply I’m a bigot because I’d rather get these people the mental health care they need but are incapable of choosing for themselves. You evidently would rather let these economic free thinkers trash our communities and steal anything not nailed down, in case they want to “opt out of capitalism.” Okay, Karl Marx.
I find those numbers misleading since they only account for those people who’ve been caught and prosecuted. Police almost universally ignore property crimes like theft and vandalism because there is so much of it and because it doesn’t bring any benefit to the city/department when your perpetrators can’t pay their fines or court costs. With mentally ill people, they’re more likely to just shoot them dead rather than bring charges against them or take them to a mental health facility. Somehow this all gets excluded from the studies.
You know, I never see anyone talking about doing anything like this when people with homes do drugs or have mental illness. How is every single crime automatically chalked up to “the homeless.” There’s a million housed and perfectly mentally stable people in California stealing catalytic converters, among other things. But the minute that or retail theft or violent crime comes up, it never fails that it’s attributed only to people who can’t pay rent.
I might agree with you on the catalytic converters but who do you think is stealing mail out of mailboxes, who’s leaving dirty needles in our parks, who’s taking over our sidewalls and other public spaces with tents and other junk ? All of us deserve better than this, including them.
You know the church is going to step in and fuck up the chances of these people ever getting real help, right?
The people with the least won’t have the resources to get proper treatment and religious groups will get license to, “have God fix them.” Next, religious groups will start seeking ways to expand what is considered mental illness applying their own christian morality. Before you know it the gays will be forced into conversion therapy or some archaic equivalent.
I am reeeeeeally sick of the way every time an article comes out about a California law, someone from Indiana or Mississippi or whatever hellhole comes out of the woodwork to explain how it will be abused because they think all of America is like their own little hellhole.
It’s always “I believe that (subordinate group) should get basic rights, but… (and then something about being inconvenienced).”
It says at the end of the article that there’s already a law that does that for certain diagnoses and at a judge’s discretion. I don’t see why it would ever need to go farther than that. I’ve worked in and been in mental health and addiction facilities and they already use mental health diagnoses and medication to subjugate people living through homelessness and the disease of addiction. Conservatorship is not the answer to someone not being able to pay rent. It will be used to diagnose people who are not mentally ill just to keep them from being an “eyesore.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that. You also can’t force someone into addiction treatment and expect it to magically work. It’s their life, they have to want to quit. We’re going to waste so many resources forcing people into addiction treatment and it won’t do anything except to make them resentful of the system. Even worse, if you lock someone away who doesn’t want to quit and their tolerance for drugs goes down, then they get out and use, they will definitely OD. So many people die or nearly die that way after getting out of jails and prisons for victimless crimes like addiction and homelessness.
The answer is making treatment more available to people. Then giving them a place to live and resources to live on while they find jobs and reintegrate into society. Only having (forced) treatment will accomplish nothing and likely make the problem worse while allowing authoritarianism into California. This law is fucking disgusting, dehumanizing, and scary. We should be ashamed of ourselves as a society that this is how we treat our most vulnerable as a society.
ETA: This is how available addiction and mental health treatment is to Californians with Medi-Cal: it’s not. Miles of red tape and bureaucracy that people with no resources or transportation are somehow supposed to navigate, just to have an indefinite wait list at the end of it. Ask me how I know. If treatment were made available to meet people where they are, it would be far more effective, if paired with reentry programs that actually treat them like people.
Holy privilege. Tell me you’ve never lived in an area with schizophrenic zombies roaming the streets.
The answer is making treatment more available to people.
These people do it have the mental capacity to accept treatment. They literally cannot make a decision about anything.
We’re not talking about someone with depression here, we’re talking about people whose higher brain functions are not working at all.
You’re looking at this through the limited range of your own mental health experience, not realizing how radically different it is for the level of mental psychosis big-city homeless have.
the part where smarmy lemmy posters recoil but people with actual drug addiction experience think “hey, yea thats a good idea”. did you guys know there’s a reason you aren’t in charge?
Literally how US healthcare works. If you pass out on a street and some kind soul calls you an ambulance, where the hospital has to perform life saving surgery, you’re on the hook for every penny despite all of this happening without your consent. Of course there’s recourse to have most of that debt forgiven because you didn’t choose this, whereas fuck that poor shmuck who elected to have their cancer treated.
In other countries they’re just happy you’re alive and able to walk out in one piece.
People who can not abide by the social contract (whether by mental illness, addiction, or otherwise) can not be given the same freedom as people who can. They will likely abuse it for their own destructive aims. They need to be forced into rehabilitation, or, if they can’t be rehabilitated, a separate housing place.
But…
Those services they need are either overwhelmed or don’t really exist in many places, because none of us taxpayers want to spend the money to actually build them, or allow them next to our house. Which is fucked up. And it’s clear that nobody is going to willingly increase their taxes to do something about it. So, what then?
I think it needs to be declared like wartime. Set aside a certain area, get as many help people as possible, and move these people over to basically a modified refugee camp, with what basically amounts to martial law to keep the peace as much as they can. Yes, it’ll be tents and sleeping bags, which is not good, but they need something. Don’t be like the NYC hospital law that sends them in for three days and lets them go back out to the street, because that helps nobody.
Forcing people to get help doesn’t help if that help isn’t actually available. I’ve had several issues over the years seeing a therapist because there is so much demand and very few therapists. Most of my appointments are rescheduled 6 months away, multiple times because I show up and the doctor is called away.
Not to mention therapists working in the public sector do not get paid well, have the largest case loads, and get the most severe cases. It’s very easy to burn out within a few years and many quickly move into private practice.
It could be good if it gets mentally ill people help more often. The issue that could happen is if it is used to claim people are mentally ill who are not.
This is a very popular perception. I don’t want to feel unsafe in my own back yard. During COVID the number of tents and encampments with high amounts of problems in Toronto public parks made certain ones more or less inaccessible by the public. There was some outcry when they were forcibly removed but overwhelmingly that move was applauded by Torontonians. We got to use our spaces again.
I really wish we’d bring back institutional supports for the mentally unwell
The issue is that being rendered homeless could cause people to develop mental illness. There is a strong correlation between rates of mental illness, and income inequality. As income inequality increases, the percentage of the population with mental health issues increases.
People who don’t want to fix income inequality and economic hardships are motivated to view mental health issues as the cause of people having economic troubles. They think that if they treat people’s mental illnesses, they’ll be to get a job, stable housing, and economic stability.
However, the idea of increased mental health issues causing economic hardship begs the question, why are people in certain areas more mentally ill than others? Every individual is unique, and people certainly experience economic ruin from mental illness, but why are the rates higher in certain areas? Researchers could study numerous different variables, seeing if different things explain the correlation between inequality and illness, but it’s still impossible to definitively prove causation.
The only way to determine causation is through experiments. Simulating economic hardship to see if it causes increased rates of mental disorders would be extremely unethical, and probably expensive. Quasi-experimental studies could test how well mentally ill people do on tests that try to measure ability to work a job, but the measure would need to be perfected over numerous studies, and could have major problems with validity. It’d be a huge undertaking.
Truthfully, nobody knows for certain if treating mental illness instead of fixing our unequal system will be successful, or more akin to treating the symptoms rather than the disease. I personally think we could fix homelessness by improving the broken housing market, making housing a human right, reducing inequality, and providing mental healthcare treatment all at once. We also need to improve other variables that might be the cause of both inequality and illness. That way we will have the best chances of addressing the cause.
expands the definition of “gravely disabled” to include people who are unable to provide themselves basic needs such as food and shelter
So if you can’t afford rent in CA, you are gravely disabled.
Sounds like a ‘great’ idea. All cops have to do is say you misuse drugs or alcohol or get a someone to diagnose you with a mental illness and BAM your no longer free. I see no possible way for this to be abused. /s
Interesting how you dropped the second half of that sentence to try to hammer it into your point about “oh em gee teh gubmint is gunna git me”.
The new law, which reforms the state’s conservatorship system, expands the definition of “gravely disabled” to include people who are unable to provide themselves basic needs such as food and shelter due to an untreated mental illness or unhealthy drugs and alcohol use.
I mean, I don’t disagree with the principle (haven’t read it to see if it’s actually feasible though).
Either a homeless person suffering from addiction and mental health issues seeks help, and gets better, or they can’t get better and go to prison where they are sheltered and fed and kept off the streets where they probably would die in a few years anyways, or commit a crime that may harm someone and go to prison anyways?
It depends if the state is willing to pay for that help, because if not it’s just a law to shuttle everyone into prison.
Federal courts have already ruled that you can’t throw people in jail for being homeless, so I don’t see that happening. The headline mentions treatment which doesn’t have to be in-patient necessarily.
I’m definitely on the fence here as I’m no fan of authoritarianism, but on the other hand I’m no fan of homeless meth addicts living in a clapped out RV on the side of the road, stealing catalytic converters by night and standing in the road shouting at cars by day. Something has to give here as people like this have been taking advantage of this messy situation.
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