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.
Mental Health and addiction treatment have to come first THEN housing.
Some people will struggle with mental illness and addiction their entire lives. Would you think it’d be easier to fight those things when you’re homeless or when you aren’t?
I’m Finnish. It’s hard to even speak to some Americans, because I genuinely can’t fathom some people who consider others to “belong on the street”, “they deserve it” and one that has even made it some of my dumbo liberalist Finnish acquaintances “homelessness is a choice”.
Ofc housing first works. Because it’s not “housing first” in the sense that it purposefully houses people before getting them mental health or addiction help. It’s “housing first” as in “having a place so you don’t need to sleep on the street is a priority”.
We have “housing first” (we don’t call it anything like that lol) in Finland, and if you were homeless and extremely fucked up on a drug binge, you’d obviously go through a ward to handle the most acute effects and get you on a basic functional level, during which they’d probably communicate with social workers who’d get them some sort of housing.
The system is good but in practice people aren’t perfect and both sides make mistakes; some people are too addicted and have problems and hard to be helped, but also sometimes the bureaucracy is fucked or some social workers / doctors suck.
Still, as long as those people have an apartment to go to, it’s more or less fine.
People are rarely as fucked up as that, even actively schizophrenic people. (Like literally my upstairs neighbour. No joke.) You shouldn’t use a psychotic episode to argue that housing being prioritised is a bad thing. That’s just a non-sequitur.
You put them in permanent medical care to treat their mental health and addiction, THEN, once they’re stable, you move them to housing.
If they are too mentally ill to become stable, you keep them in medical care.
You don’t understand how long-term psychiatric care works.
You don’t “cure” schizophrenia, buddy. Most patients are mostly stable.
I know people with mental illness who sometimes stop taking their meds and start fucking about and being manic, and once they get to be too disruptive, someone calls the cops, the cops go check it out (ours don’t murder the mentally ill — which is a massive difference between our countries — ours are bastards still, but less murdery ones), and take him to the ER from which people who can’t be helped right away because they’re psychotic due to drugs go to a closed ward and people who are psychotic for non-substance reasons go another closed ward.
Usually though, with cases such as I know, it’s quite enough for the cops to take the person to the ER where they give a slow-release IM injection of some antipsychotics, and the people won’t be as bothersome for a week or two (there definitely are side effects to these meds, context really matters), but they will be able to go home and won’t need to be taken into a ward — because outpatient care is a lot cheaper than inpatient care.
Stable being “no longer collecting garbage and seeing faces on the walls”.
In the case cited above, the guy had housing but was still in a mental health crisis. Housing First cannot and will not provide that stability, only professional mental health care can do that.
And why do you think them not being homeless somehow excludes the option of mental health care?
It doesn’t here. Where we actually use this policy.
Because right now, Housing First doesn’t demand treatment. That’s why it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t even demand you fill prescribed medication and take it on schedule, hell, it doesn’t even require you get evaluated for prescribed medication.
So you get stories like the above, a housed undiagnosed mental patient filling their home with garbage and living in terror from things that aren’t there.
Do you think there’s no professional managing the case? That they just give them keys, a pat on the back, and proclaim “Figure it out!” It’s naive to think either solution is a magic bullet, but one approach has statistically better outcomes.
That’s EXACTLY the problem with Housing First. Legally they are prevented from placing restrictions on the housing.
So they can’t demand residents enter treatment, remain sober, take their meds or even obtain proper meds.
It’s housing without restrictions and that plainly does not work if the people you are housing have severe mental illness and addiction issues.
