this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Not every homeless person is mentally ill. Even those that are weren’t necessarily that way before; being homeless is not great for your mental health. So giving them a place to live would be an unequivocal good for all of them where as what you’re suggesting only really helps a fraction of them.
Reopen asylums if you want, but they aren’t going to stop being homeless once they finish their treatment. Unless what you really want is just a pseudo prison to lock them all up in so you don’t have to look at them.
80% of the chronically homeless have life long mental health issues, and 60% of the chronically homeless have drug addictions.
Mental health issues caused them to be homeless. People with severe Bipolar, borderline, or schizoeffective disorders can't function in society without being heavily medicated, and a choice was made to not take that medication (I don't blame them. Anitsychotics have super shitty side effects).
Sure, homelessness might make it worse, but their illness is what led to the homelessness.
My source is me. I already did the research myself, but you're more than welcome to type a few words into Google if you don't believe me.
@[email protected] please respond
What percentage of people with lifelong mental health issues are homeless? What percentage of the housed population has lifelong mental health issues? Should we lock up the ones with houses in asylums too?
Neither of those statistics are relevant to the discussion.
Neither are the ones you posted.
No, the ones I posted show the demographics of the chronically homeless. People who aren't homeless have nothing to do with the discussion.
No the ones you posted are as disingenuous as posting crime stats to imply that black people are inherently violent. Correlation is not causation and you can’t just look at them in a vacuum.
Without knowing what the baseline for mental health is how do you even know that 80% is statistically significant deviation from the standard population? I can tell you for certain that around 60% of people I’ve met have lifelong drug problems, homeless or not.
Have you been to a section 8 neighborhood? What you’re suggesting would be even worse
Each person needs the help they need…. Some homeless folks just need a break, for sure! I’ve been there myself. Some of them are legit crazy and homeless for a good reason, I’ve lived alongside them and you can’t just give them a home and all is well, they legit need professional help. Putting those folks up in housing alongside the folks that do legit just need a little help will taint the public perception against all of them and screw up a good attempt at solving the issue. We really need a system in place to evaluate these folks and get them the level of help they really need, but that would be socialism and that’s bad so I guess let’s all just keep suffering hahaha
What a ridiculous question
Then you should have no trouble providing me with the stats that prove how ridiculous it is.
Sure thing: https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.x7HX2fwG3CyMLgKCNCeQYwHaE9&pid=Api
It doesn't matter what the general population is. We're discussing the homeless population.
Your questions are a strawman.
You should probably get a better grasp of statistics before you try to lie with them. Black people are homeless at a rate four times higher than whites, are you going to suggest melanin causes homelessness? Hawaiians experience it at a rate three times higher than black people, what could possibly explain that other than their hawaiianness? Here’s my source, which I note you neglected to provide for your own stats.
Are you going to suggest that race plays no factor and it's entirely a coincidence? What exactly are you suggesting here? "All the data must be pure coincidence"? "What even IS data anyways?"
I’m trying to suggest that correlation is not causation which is not exactly an esoteric fucking concept. Unless you think that their skin color is the cause for it and that the solution is forced skin lightening treatments.
And I'm trying to suggest "it's the sole cause" and "it has no impact whatsoever" are both fundamentally stupid things to say.
Skin color is not a cause you cretin, in whole or in part. The cause with black people is systemic racism and the cause for Hawaiians is the fact that they got turned into a fucking resort state and real estate spiraled. Just like the cause of homelessness is not mental illness, it’s an institutional unwillingness to provide them with homes.
Aka skin color, dumbass
System racism is not caused by skin color, either. It’s caused by racists and it’s not solved by fixing the colors to match.
Racists who are angry about...?
At least you admit that racism is a thing, so you're not completely bonkers.
Now let's pull back the analogy. We were comparing racism to mental disorders and drug use, right? Do you admit those are in fact things which exist?
They’re not angry about the color of their skin. If you think that they are then you really don’t understand racism. There are plenty of places in the world where two very similar groups are racist to each other over extremely minor differences that most outsiders would overlook.
Make your point or don’t I’m not playing along with your rhetorical framing.
Fine, let's go back a bit.
Your stance is that the mental/substance abuse aspects of many homeless people is in no way, in whole or in part, a cause of their homelessness. Correct?
I haven’t felt the need to bring this up yet since the reasoning is flawed regardless of the accuracy of the stats, but since I get the feeling you’re going to try and force me to defend that stance anyway. The actual number of homeless with mental health issues is closer to 30% compared to the baseline of over 20% for all US adults. Homelessness has a far greater correlation with housing prices, surprising absolutely no one that thought about it for more than two seconds.
No my stance is and always was that a single unsourced statistic that “80% of homeless people experience lifelong mental illness” is not proof that mental illness causes homelessness. Especially when presented without comtext to compare it to.
Cool, then guess what, YOU AGREE WITH THE PERSON YOU STARTED ARGUING WITH, dumbass. It's a factor. No one ever claimed it was the sole factor. It is a complicated issue.
No I don’t agree with them. They didn’t claim it was a mere factor they claimed it as the main primary factor that had to be solved to fix it. The issue is actually pretty fucking simple, if you give people homes they stop being homeless. There’s absolutely no evidence that mental illness is a cause rather than a symptom of homelessness.
Well that's just demonstrably untrue, but let's set that aside for a moment.
Sure, which is different from "the sole cause" which is what you've been bullshitting about.
If you both agree that mental illness is a contributing factor, but disagree on the severity, then you can start discussing as equals. Instead, you chose to REEEEEEEEEEEE and start a fight.
I don’t agree that is a contributing factor. That was not what I was arguing about before, because it wasn’t necessary to address it to point out the flawed reasoning that he was using.
A single incorrect and unsourced stat is not proof of shit, and your consistent refusal to address that makes it pretty fucking rich that you’re insulting me for not understanding the posts I’m responding to.
And if it’s demonstrably untrue then demonstrate it or fuck off.
You seriously disagree that untreated mental illness can lead to homelessness?
Dumb ass
And a near-0% of them will ever make progress on that without a home. All of that is downstream from having safe and secure housing.