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AMERICA’S LOVE OF HOMELESSNESS
One of the things America has taught and promoted is the closing down of costly and admittedly archaic public funded mental institutions, throwing the inmates out onto the streets. This has been promoted as being a significant cost saving in what is primarily a free enterprise, privatized medicine, system. Civil libertarians were tricked by those making the decisions into providing vocal and unequivocal support for those changes. The epidemic of closures spread rapidly into Canada, and American thinking on the subject tended to predominate.
Why improve those old and in need of extensive modernization, repairs and replacement, facilities because that costs a lot of money. Why modernize them ? That is too expensive. In America it was realized that the private enterprise segment will not take over that function. Too expensive for private enterprise, and government does not want to pay private enterprise 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 same principle of cost savings under a guise of “civil liberties” in Canada as readily as most Americans fell for it. In a time of government budget cuts and constraints it looked like it was a lead to follow, but without fully understanding the American basis for the decisions that America was making.,
The fact was that many of those people who had been institutionalized were in fact unable to function properly in society. At least they could not function properly, if at all. Many were and remained seriously mentally ill. However, they were tossed out into society, and the public hospitals closed down, or their services greatly reduced. Relatives usually could not and would not cope with them. Many of the organizations providing assistance to the underprivileged and down and out similarly found many too difficult, and an immense potential drain on already stretched and inadequate resources. Not only that but those organizations largely rely upon volunteers and non professionals. The latter are paid well below the levels of professional hospital staff, and do not have the education or training.
It was in part American influence and in part the high cost of institutionalization that led to the decision. However it is subsequently easy to find professionals, in the know about what has happened readily 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 adequate care were in the old and inadequate system, and similarly higher than costs would be in an adequate system.
Many became physically sicker, seriously injured, frost bitten, infected, parasite infested, beaten up, and drug addicted once out there in the real world and no longer sheltered within institutional surroundings. 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. In our major population centers it is a frequent sight to see a fire crew providing first aid and resuscitation to homeless. It happens regularly. However, what we can say, today is that we don't leave them in the back alley trash compactors. They actually do receive emergency services when something serious is know to have happened.
We have also arrived at the more American phenomenon of homeless becoming squatters in abandoned buildings, and derelict structures. We had very little of that before, but now we have plenty of it. This posing some added danger to our children, and to the unwary who might wander into what becomes the territory of those with no territory of their own. Often it is the preserve of homeless who have become street drug addicts, witnessed by the syringes, solvent containers and other similar refuse indicative of habits.
We also have some homeless, similar to America who are ex inmates who cannot find a place in society, after coming out of their incarceration. Most of those commit new crimes and go back to jail where it is warm and there is a steady diet and some chance of medical care. Some of those inmates have mental illnesses that we too are failing to adequately diagnose and treat. Unfortunately it is not routine for every convicted criminal, found guilty of a serious crime, to be subjected to a complete and thorough medical and psychological examination to determine what is wrong with them, in medical terms. Most are ill, in one way or another. It is long past time when convicted criminals received routine, mandatory medical workups and a full psychiatric assessment so that they can be treated rather than further victimized.
What we lack in Canada is the other species of homeless, which America has some of. Those are the ex military outcasts, who society claims do not fit in with it after they return home or are released from their military service. In fact the less well known fact is that while those numbers have decreased in the recent decade, during the Cold War years there was a tendency to keep some of those people out there, as homeless survivalists, covertly encouraged and forced to that lifestyle in case of the impending and immanently expected apocalypse. After all they were well trained to be able to survive the worst that the environment and society might offer, and out there some of them would still be around after the nuclear exchange. Similar to other forms of survivalism, it was more a conspiracy of potential survival rather than anything else. There are ample accounts of ex military personnel still under the watchful eye of the military after officially leaving the service functioning as indigents and homeless. The military chose to leave them that way, for multiple reasons, not the least of which was the potential for apocalyptic destruction of social order and the need for a scattering of non based and survival ready soldiers in a post apocalyptic world. That there are still some ex military out there, in the same category, is part legacy and partly more normative sociology of how societies tend to treat ex service personnel. In that instance the problem becomes one related to mental illness and all of the other more usual factors tend to be applicable.
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 increasingly serious physical and mental chronic and eventually terminal illness.
In some ways a society such as America, with totalitarian tendencies, relies on something else that homeless people, pan handlers, beggars, drug addicts, out on the street provide. They provide a source of terror. They cause fear in those who see them, and who are made to fear being forced into similar destitution. That serves a political motive. So there is even less desire to accommodate the needs of those people, or to care for them properly. Much less desire to provide modern, effective, and humane, institutions for that care. Of course that means that you might find the occasional political dissident reduced to disempowered, disenfranchised, homelessness for the crime of having raised his or her voice against the regime. There are ample tales of that too, and some are more true than the paranoid and psychotic fantasies of others. The mixture of mental illness with political truth makes truth suspect and conceals that truth. Another political motive for keeping the mentally ill out on the street. It is much easier to lose some dissidents there, among them, into disempowered, discredited, destruction of mind and body. When you cannot excute your dissidents you make them homeless, but that only works if you can make them unbelievable, merging them with an unbelievable population much larger then their own numbers. In some ways public execution by a quick hang drawing and quartering, might have proven more humane than what can happen to some who fall into disfavor. Professionals have yet to sort that one out as to who is a social exile for too much truth, and who is a social exile for having lost touch with reality.
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. Civil libertarians, looking at the institutions of the past, tend to
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. It is more a political problem than it is a cost factor problem.
It is long past the time when medical professionals, sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, criminologists, and civil libertarians joined together, in the name of truth, reason, factual science, and the good of the victims of the system, to push for, to demand, to make certain that the system changes to the provision of adequate institutional supportive and sheltering environments, appropriate social reconnection, opportunities for real meaning, and proper medical care, for the bodies and minds, of society’s most unfortunate, its homeless.
Without that basic compassion as society truly has no right to exist.
Cheers.
Robert Morpheal
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