Housing advocates oppose California law designed to help homeless (mental health)

[C C]

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/18/why-hou...-homeless/

EXCERPTS: Tens of thousands of people lack access to housing in California. Streets strewn with tents have become ubiquitous across the state as the cost of living rises and wages stagnate. For months, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been touting a solution: forcing unhoused people with mental health conditions into treatment.

While some groups have opposed this plan since its conception [...] they were unable to stop its passing. On Wednesday, Sept 14, Newsom signed SB 1338, the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Act (CARE) into law. The CARE Act incorporates a court system targeting people with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, who may also have substance use disorders.

Already, unhoused people with severe mental health disorders can be involuntarily held in psychiatric care, but only for three days. They can leave only if they promise to take medications and make certain appointments. Using a court order, the CARE Act extends that period for up to a year, which can be extended to two years.

Family members, service providers and first responders — including paramedics or police officers — are among those legally able to file a petition with CARE court. If facing criminal charges, the individual could avoid punishment by enrolling in a mental health treatment plan. A judge could then order someone into treatment, including housing and medications.

[...] "This law violates a person's right to self-determination and violates people's right to choose how they want to and need to address their problems," Sam Tsemberis told Salon.

It's a first-of-its-kind law in the United States, but some other states have laws that share elements of the plan. The CARE Act was drafted by Senator Thomas Umberg (D-Santa Ana) and Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton.) It goes into effect next year, but only in seven counties: Glenn, Orange, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Stanislaus and Tuolumne.

Newsom's office is describing the program as a "paradigm shift" — but some advocates say that shift is in the wrong direction.

"This law violates a person's right to self-determination and violates people's right to choose how they want to and need to address their problems," Sam Tsemberis told Salon in an email. Tsemberis is the founder and CEO of Pathways Housing First Institute, a non-profit founded in 1992 that originated the Housing First model for addressing housing access. He characterized the law as politically motivated, citing Newsom's alleged bid for U.S. president, and designed to appeal to voters "tired of seeing homelessness."

"Based on my clinical experience and research comparing voluntary and involuntary court-mandated treatment programs, it is very clear that better outcomes are achieved when treatment is voluntary, trauma-informed, and compassionate," Tsemberis said, adding, "This law will not have any impact on reducing homelessness because it does not provide funding for housing."

Meanwhile, homes for people with severe mental illness are rapidly closing, with at least 96 facilities closing since 2016, according to the Los Angeles Times. In January 2020, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness reported California has 161,000 people experiencing homelessness, including 7,600 students. The CARE Court program is estimated to help 12,000 people, Newsom's office claims.

But the fact that police can intervene in these situations has alarmed some advocates. "Law enforcement and outreach workers would have a new tool to threaten unhoused people with referral to the court to pressure them to move from a given area," Human Rights Watch said in April... (MORE - details)

[Yazata]

California's new law is not going to be popular with the people that it is supposedly going to help, the homeless themselves.

My knowledge of the homeless is that most of them just want to be left alone. The last people they want to see are the police and the social workers. They just want to live in their tent camps with plenty of drugs and minimal hassles.

So the new law authorizes a whole system of new courts with the power to effectively commit people to psychiatric care against their will. Pretty much the same system that liberal do-gooders abolished in the 1960's-1970's.

The problem is that the psychiatric hospitals that existed then don't exist now. So what kind of residential facilities are these new courts going to commit the mentally ill homeless to?

That's going to be the first problem, finding the necessary facilities.

Then there's going to be a whole legal specialty growing up around the new mental health courts, and a whole new species of civil rights activist fighting the involuntary commitments.

And it's all going to cost money, which will fuel a whole new "public service" bureaucracy with thousands of employees.

It will end up costing vast sums of taxpayers money but it's unlikely to put a dent in the homeless problem.

[RainbowUnicorn]

They can leave only if they promise to take medications and make certain appointments.

where does the money come from to make the appointments ?

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It will end up costing vast sums of taxpayers money but it's unlikely to put a dent in the homeless problem.

homelessness drives increased house sale prices & the rental market, which people seek to increase. GREED.



so there is considerable numbers of people and companys who invest in maintaining homelessness to keep profiting from it.

[Syne]

homelessness drives increased house sale prices & the rental market, which people seek to increase. GREED.



so there is considerable numbers of people and companys who invest in maintaining homelessness to keep profiting from it.

As usual, RU with some complete nonsense.

Homelessness doesn't drive housing prices. High demand drives housing prices out some people's means and they resort of homelessness.
No one profits from the homeless. Their huge numbers are the result of failed leftist policies. Probably the same leftists you fed you this BS about profiting from homelessness.

[Yazata]

In the 1960s, a wave of well-intentioned do-gooders shut insane asylums down. Between activist journalists and several popular novels of the time, the public got the idea that mental hospitals were without exception absolutely horrible places, hell on earth. We still see that idea reflected in some of the horror movies of today.

The biggest problem is that nobody really knows how to treat mental illness. Certainly not the major psychoses. The best that psychiatrists and clinical psychologists can do today is drug mental patients until their worst symptoms subside. Unfortunately the drugs have such devastating side effects that most mental patients would rather live with their symptoms, or self-treat themselves with opioids that while they don't improve the symptoms, make the individual feel good and not care any longer.

These people can't work, can't support themselves, and they end up on the street.

After the mental hospitals disappeared, public assistance used to put them up in cheap hotel rooms, in the 'single room occupancy' residential hotels. But pack too many psychiatric cases into those and they turn into psychiatric hospitals without staff. People screaming incoherently out their windows, assaulting each other and openly dealing drugs. The police were called almost every night.

So cities everywhere tore those residential hotels down as urban renewal measures, to eliminate the urban blight they caused. In San Francisco, they were replaced with upscale condos inhabited by a whole new population. (I guess that's where the greed factors in.)

The few low-end residential hotels remaining today are filled with recent immigrants (often illegal). This different new population causes fewer problems with drugs, assaults or visits by the police, so landlords prefer them. And that's the problem with all the calls for more low cost housing that we hear so often. If they build more low rent housing, it will just attract a new poor population from outside such as third-world immigrants, not the homeless.

So the psychiatric population that was once housed with public-assistance housing vouchers in those places has been forced out onto the streets as their homes were torn down or taken over by new populations.

Then the cities set up homeless shelters. Except that they are so sordid and so dangerous that most homeless people avoid them and prefer to live with their friends in their little encampments where they can use drugs freely, face less confrontation and physical threat and aren't hassled by social workers. Homeless people (especially females) tend to avoid homeless shelters like the plague, for good reason.

In the more distant past, people with psychiatric problems typically were helped by their families. There was always the crazy uncle that everybody avoided but everyone talked about. But they were still family, people felt kind of responsible and their relatives still kind of looked out for them. But today that's fantasy-land. The extended family disappeared 50 or 100 years ago. And more recent feminism has pretty much destroyed the nuclear family as well. Today the public schools are expected to take over the child raising functions once exercised by parents. It's a social experiment that's unprecedented in all of human history and I don't expect it to end well. The point being that there's no family any longer to take care of the crazy person, except perhaps a few people at the end of their own rope and unable to cope.

Most of the unhoused psychiatric population don't have anyone willing and able to take them in, except their little circles of friends on the street, their fellow crazies.

The fundamental problem is that nobody knows how to treat mental illness. Traditional sources of help (the family, the church) are disappearing fast. The mentally ill are facing intense new competition from new low-end populations like the burgeoning numbers of illegals in every community. And there's the fact that packing too many psychiatric individuals in close proximity creates severe problems of its own, not only for them, but for the surrounding population.

It's a problem that nobody at present knows how to solve. And truth be told, nobody seems to really even want to.