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One of the things America has taught is the closing down of costly and admittedly archaic
public funded mental institutions, throwing the inmates out onto the streets. A cost
saving in a free enterprise, privatized medicine, system. Why improve those facilities
because that costs a lot of money. Why modernize them ? That is too expensive. The
private enterprise segment will not take over that function. Too expensive, and government
does not want to pay them to do it either. So the solution ? Toss the inmates of public
mental institutions out onto the streets. Make them homeless.
We fell for that in Canada too, and in discussion with someone who used to run a public
mental hospital, as its chief psychiatrist, I found the same concern that I had arrived at,
that many of those people who had been institutionalized were in fact unable to function
properly in society. Many were and remained mentally ill. However, they were tossed out
into society, and the public hospitals closed down, or their services greatly reduced. It
was in part American influence and in part the high cost of institutionalization. We agreed
that the long term costs of the failure to provide adequate and progressive institutional
care for those people were higher than the costs of care. Many became physically sicker,
seriously injured, frost bitten, infected, and drug addicted once out there. Each such
instance was in fact a costly consequence of lack of care. We are tired of being Americanized
in Canada. Tired of getting led in the wrong direction. We are tired of seeing our own
people suffer more and more similarly to how some Americans are made to suffer. We had
something a little better than that going for us back in the days before we became so
wrongfully convinced to become more 'American' in our ways of doing things. Luckily
we still have socialized medicine, as the UK has its national health system. So the
homeless get picked up in ambulances, taken in to emergency rooms, and they get
treated without questions as to whether they have credit cards and bank balances. We
don't leave them in the back alley trash compactors.
The fact is that a large percentage of the homeless do have social and psychological
problems far in excess of those prevalent in the majority of the population. They often
do not recognize their own problems. They get little or no treatment, once out on the
street. They are simply discarded, thrown away, because no one else can really handle
their problems outside of medical institutionalization. If they fail to commit a serious
crime and do not get housed in a prison, they remain out on the streets, hopeless
cases of chronic illness.
Simply because of the way mental institutions were run in the past, does not mean that
public facilities for the care and treatment of society's ill should be closed or lacking.
The largest portion of the homeless need physical and psychological medical care. They
need one or another form of medication. They need a sheltered environment. Many
are fragile personalities or variously dysfunctional, needing sheltered communities,
where they can be given more meaningful lives than the hell of out on the street.
Unfortunately in a free enterprise, privatized, medical system that is hard to do. It is
even harder to build and maintain modern facilities that truly provide for quality of
life rather than merely incarceration. Medicated incarceration is not a positive enough
answer, but providing opportunity for real quality of life while meeting special needs
is an answer and that answer is not optional. It is something a society must do, among
its most fundamental responsibilities.
The cost ?
How much are the fiscal corporate bailouts costing ?
It doesn't cost that much.
Cheers.
Robert Morpheal
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