My friend was a popular, promising artist - how did he end up on the streets of Portland, addicted and dangerous?
My friend was a popular, promising artist - how did he end up on the streets of Portland, addicted and dangerous?
When I first met Evan B Harris he was fizzing with talent and kindness. So I was shocked to hear he had become homeless and out of control. What happened to him is a story playing out in cities across America
Seems like they are over complicating it...
"Evan’s younger brother had experienced some serious mental health issues and he was awaiting news of a diagnosis."
"his mother was a schizophrenic and a heroin addict who often paid for her drug habit with sex. They were homeless, moving constantly. Often she would head off for days at a time, leaving Evan with friends or relatives, or sometimes on his own, without food. When he was 11, she took her own life"
"Evan’s father began to suffer with mental health issues. By the time the pandemic arrived, he was in full crisis, using drugs and worried enough about Covid that he had locked himself inside his house. For a week, Evan stayed with him, and they shuttled back and forth to hospital as his father experienced mounting phobias and suicidal thoughts, but refused treatment. At the end of that week, his father took his own life."
Dude literally had the deck stacked against him.
"The real problem came when Evan inherited his share of his father’s estate – $170,000. He used some of the money to rent an apartment. “But I had extreme schizophrenia and I just filled it with trash because I was so out of my mind,” he says. “I was seeing faces dripping down the walls, I couldn’t even be in there.”"
And this, kids, is why the "Housing First" model won't work. Mental Health and addiction treatment have to come first THEN housing.
You're viewing part of a thread.
You'll get those no matter what, until you manage to cure ALL undiagnosed mental illness. And undiagnosed mental illness is by definition undiagnosed.
Without "housing first" (again, a bullshit name) you'd have those people living on the street. You may not understand this, clearly living a sheltered life and having little to no actual experience on the matter, but homeless crazy people are a lot more dangerous than crazy people who get to go crazy in an apartment.
Oh no, did an undiagnosed mental illness result in an apartment that will take two men at least an hour and a half to fix? Oh no, that's acceptable, clearly we should not house people at all and toss everyone on the street to get even sicker and literally die.
"Housing first" is preventative. Living on the street creates mental illness, and a person NOT being homeless does NOT prevent them from getting mental health care. The main point of my last comment, nay, all my comments. Yet you can't answer it.
The fix for this is super simple, you get people healthy BEFORE getting them into housing.
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You collect up all the homeless people and evaluate them.
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Folks with mental illness are diverted to treatment.
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Folks with addiction issues are diverted to treatment.
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Folks with outstanding warrants are sent to corrections.
NOW...
Once people successfully complete treatment or have served their prison time, there needs to be a re-integration system, this applies also to homeless people who aren't part of 2-4.
- Job and clothing assistance. Resume building, job skills, access to laundry, a mailing address, phone, email and internet.
There needs to be specialists here specifically to help people with criminal records.
- NOW you bring in the housing assistance. You've given people the skills they need to get healthy, avoid addiction, and get a job. Now they're ready for housing. Not before.
As in step 5, there needs to be housing specialists just for people with criminal records.
If you put housing first, with no requirements for mental health or addiction services, it fails. Over and over and over again, it fails.
If you put housing first, with no requirements for mental health or addiction services, it fails.
We have housing first in Finland and literally no-one lives on the streets. In tve US, they create new mental illness every day because they have to live on the streets which are covered in human shit.
You do not understand psychiatry or social policies and you shouldn't pretend to. You're some sort of sheltered liberalist who doesn't get heard in real life so you have to do... this.
Over and over and over again, it fails.
I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire, I'm a billionaire.
....
Wait... just saying things doesn't make them true? Huh. Well that's a surprise for both of us, isn't it?
Seeing how we literally don't have anyone living on the street in my country. What country are you from and why do you keep avoiding my question of why do you think NOT being homeless prevents people from getting mental health care?
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-international-philanthropic-071123.html
Finland also has universal health care which the United States does not have. You guarantee people will get the mental and physical health treatment they need, the US refuses to do that.
And again, refusing to answer how you think not being homeless prevents people from mental health care.
If you can't pay for housing, you can't pay for health care, mental or otherwise and in the US, that's the barrier to entry.
The US not having social security doesn't mean housing first is a bad policy.
No, concentrating untreated psychotics and addicts into a single location makes it bad policy.
What does that even mean?
Again. We use that policy. You don't. I have experience. You don't. None of you're bullshit makes sense. Mine does.
Housing first gives people housing without requiring them to enter mental health or addiction treatment.
You don't solve problems that way, you concentrate and amplify them. See all the stories throughout this thread on the continual failure of housing first.
TREATMENT first, then housing.
"Let's wait until we've cured all mental illness to give housing to everyone."
Yeah see the part in my first comment about how it's "hard to talk to some Americans"? This is exactly what I mean. This is like talking to someone from a theocracy advocating to kill all the gays. There's no commonality, there's no way for me to reason to you, there's nothing in the real world you'd respond to.
You just hold an opinion, and spam and spam and spam, like another pigheaded religious person.
Housing does not prevent treatment. Those aren't either or things. Prioritising housing doesn't mean "we'll get them an apartment before getting them any help for their mental illness" as I've explained in tedious length several times, it means that the policy understands that the foundation of mental health is physical safety that comes from having a place to sleep that's not the street.
This really isn't hard.
Imagine how annoying it would be for you to try to talk to a 18th century slaveowner about how it's not actually good for society to have slavery. Imagine just how annoying it would be to try to calmly talk the some slavers out of their "but they're sub-human, they love working, I'm just helping them, I'm actually the good guy here". Just imagine that for a bit.
And then realise that's the exact conversation we're having, and you're on the wrong side of it.
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