| AMERICA'S LOVE OF HOMELESSNESS |
http://groups.google.com |
| Robert Morpheal, Bob Ezergailis, Morphealism (morpheal@yahoo.com) |
2008/12/04 10:47 |
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
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
its homeless.
Without that basic compassion a society truly has no right to exist.
Cheers.
Robert Morpheal
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