Define mental illness, define addiction, define help, define force.
It depends. Define define.
Seriously… No hyperbole, I’d imagine the majority of people that would enthusiastically vote for trump in this next electron after he led a violent insurrection to try to end American democracy (and had actual discussed plans for the military to shoot American civilians if the overthrow were successful and there was an opposition movement) actively suffer from a listed disorder and are in need of treatment.
That’s the whole point of the bill, it gives those definitions. You could read it yourself if you want.
They’re gonna use this to jail and subjugated the unhoused populations aren’t they?
Federal courts have already ruled that you can’t throw people in jail for being homeless, so I don’t see that happening. The headline mentions treatment which doesn’t have to be in-patient necessarily.
I’m definitely on the fence here as I’m no fan of authoritarianism, but on the other hand I’m no fan of homeless meth addicts living in a clapped out RV on the side of the road, stealing catalytic converters by night and standing in the road shouting at cars by day. Something has to give here as people like this have been taking advantage of this messy situation.
Federal courts have already ruled that you can’t throw people in jail for being homeless,
No, that doesnt stop them from making up some bullshit charge though. This is America, afterall.
Not really. This is California, which is very different from the rest of America. Especially when it comes to policing the homeless.
expands the definition of “gravely disabled” to include people who are unable to provide themselves basic needs such as food and shelter
So if you can’t afford rent in CA, you are gravely disabled.
Sounds like a ‘great’ idea. All cops have to do is say you misuse drugs or alcohol or get a someone to diagnose you with a mental illness and BAM your no longer free. I see no possible way for this to be abused. /s
If I ever lose my job I’m moving to CA before my meds wear off.
Interesting how you dropped the second half of that sentence to try to hammer it into your point about “oh em gee teh gubmint is gunna git me”.
The new law, which reforms the state’s conservatorship system, expands the definition of “gravely disabled” to include people who are unable to provide themselves basic needs such as food and shelter due to an untreated mental illness or unhealthy drugs and alcohol use.
How is ‘unhealthy’ defined?
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB43
How about you read the bill yourself instead of asking some dipshit on the internet to tell you what to think?
Wtf is wrong with you
People like you, I would assume
Looks like they addressed exactly that in the second paragraph of their comment.
I agree. While this sounds great on paper, there’s a chance for it to get abused. And we all know that it will end up being abused.
In Canada, we recommend MAID (medical assistance in dying) if you can’t afford food and shelter.
I wish I was kidding. The government literally recommends you use their suicide chambers if you can’t pay your bills and have a mental illness.
Do they accept medical tourists?
Asking for a friend…
Forcing people to get help doesn’t help if that help isn’t actually available. I’ve had several issues over the years seeing a therapist because there is so much demand and very few therapists. Most of my appointments are rescheduled 6 months away, multiple times because I show up and the doctor is called away.
theres few therapists, even less good therapists.
Good therapists exists, but unless you are incredibly lucky, its a chore and financial burden trying to find them.
Not to mention therapists working in the public sector do not get paid well, have the largest case loads, and get the most severe cases. It’s very easy to burn out within a few years and many quickly move into private practice.
More like unless you’re incredibly rich you will never be able to afford one.
The new law, which reforms the state’s conservatorship system, expands the definition of “gravely disabled” to include people who are unable to provide themselves basic needs such as food and shelter due to an untreated mental illness or unhealthy drugs and alcohol use. Local governments say current state laws leave their hands tied if a person refuses to receive help.
The law is designed to make it easier for authorities to provide care to people with untreated mental illness or addictions to alcohol and drugs, many of whom are homeless.
I work in mental health in another state, and I’ve been wishing for a law like this since I started my career. I don’t believe people who have any sort of mental illness should be forced into treatment, but laws enacted at the behest of rights groups for the mentally ill have gone too far (although it’s certainly better that we have those laws than don’t). Some people are so sick they’re their own insurmountable obstacle to care, and that would be fine if their condition only affected them, but it often doesn’t. For their sakes and that of those around them, I agree some people should be forced to get their issues treated.
It’s always “I believe that (subordinate group) should get basic rights, but… (and then something about being inconvenienced).”
It says at the end of the article that there’s already a law that does that for certain diagnoses and at a judge’s discretion. I don’t see why it would ever need to go farther than that. I’ve worked in and been in mental health and addiction facilities and they already use mental health diagnoses and medication to subjugate people living through homelessness and the disease of addiction. Conservatorship is not the answer to someone not being able to pay rent. It will be used to diagnose people who are not mentally ill just to keep them from being an “eyesore.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that. You also can’t force someone into addiction treatment and expect it to magically work. It’s their life, they have to want to quit. We’re going to waste so many resources forcing people into addiction treatment and it won’t do anything except to make them resentful of the system. Even worse, if you lock someone away who doesn’t want to quit and their tolerance for drugs goes down, then they get out and use, they will definitely OD. So many people die or nearly die that way after getting out of jails and prisons for victimless crimes like addiction and homelessness.
The answer is making treatment more available to people. Then giving them a place to live and resources to live on while they find jobs and reintegrate into society. Only having (forced) treatment will accomplish nothing and likely make the problem worse while allowing authoritarianism into California. This law is fucking disgusting, dehumanizing, and scary. We should be ashamed of ourselves as a society that this is how we treat our most vulnerable as a society.
ETA: This is how available addiction and mental health treatment is to Californians with Medi-Cal: it’s not. Miles of red tape and bureaucracy that people with no resources or transportation are somehow supposed to navigate, just to have an indefinite wait list at the end of it. Ask me how I know. If treatment were made available to meet people where they are, it would be far more effective, if paired with reentry programs that actually treat them like people.
and then something about being inconvenienced
Holy privilege. Tell me you’ve never lived in an area with schizophrenic zombies roaming the streets.
The answer is making treatment more available to people.
These people do it have the mental capacity to accept treatment. They literally cannot make a decision about anything.
We’re not talking about someone with depression here, we’re talking about people whose higher brain functions are not working at all.
You’re looking at this through the limited range of your own mental health experience, not realizing how radically different it is for the level of mental psychosis big-city homeless have.
You know the church is going to step in and fuck up the chances of these people ever getting real help, right?
The people with the least won’t have the resources to get proper treatment and religious groups will get license to, “have God fix them.” Next, religious groups will start seeking ways to expand what is considered mental illness applying their own christian morality. Before you know it the gays will be forced into conversion therapy or some archaic equivalent.
I am reeeeeeally sick of the way every time an article comes out about a California law, someone from Indiana or Mississippi or whatever hellhole comes out of the woodwork to explain how it will be abused because they think all of America is like their own little hellhole.
Lol at the thought that the religious right hasn’t a foothold in California.
They’re fairly irrelevant
Hubris
It could be good if it gets mentally ill people help more often. The issue that could happen is if it is used to claim people are mentally ill who are not.
They’re targeting homeless people. This is gonna go bad real quick.
Or good. I’d love to have my parks and sense of safety back.
The issue is that being rendered homeless could cause people to develop mental illness. There is a strong correlation between rates of mental illness, and income inequality. As income inequality increases, the percentage of the population with mental health issues increases.
People who don’t want to fix income inequality and economic hardships are motivated to view mental health issues as the cause of people having economic troubles. They think that if they treat people’s mental illnesses, they’ll be to get a job, stable housing, and economic stability.
However, the idea of increased mental health issues causing economic hardship begs the question, why are people in certain areas more mentally ill than others? Every individual is unique, and people certainly experience economic ruin from mental illness, but why are the rates higher in certain areas? Researchers could study numerous different variables, seeing if different things explain the correlation between inequality and illness, but it’s still impossible to definitively prove causation.
The only way to determine causation is through experiments. Simulating economic hardship to see if it causes increased rates of mental disorders would be extremely unethical, and probably expensive. Quasi-experimental studies could test how well mentally ill people do on tests that try to measure ability to work a job, but the measure would need to be perfected over numerous studies, and could have major problems with validity. It’d be a huge undertaking.
Truthfully, nobody knows for certain if treating mental illness instead of fixing our unequal system will be successful, or more akin to treating the symptoms rather than the disease. I personally think we could fix homelessness by improving the broken housing market, making housing a human right, reducing inequality, and providing mental healthcare treatment all at once. We also need to improve other variables that might be the cause of both inequality and illness. That way we will have the best chances of addressing the cause.
Oh yeah, we all forgot. This is the “You Show.”
Piss of back to your cave NIMBY-ist
Wanting to feel safe in your town from violent homeless people high as a kite…now exclusively a nimby trait
This is a very popular perception. I don’t want to feel unsafe in my own back yard. During COVID the number of tents and encampments with high amounts of problems in Toronto public parks made certain ones more or less inaccessible by the public. There was some outcry when they were forcibly removed but overwhelmingly that move was applauded by Torontonians. We got to use our spaces again.
I really wish we’d bring back institutional supports for the mentally unwell
It’s not a cave, it’s acres of beautiful property.
Only someone trying to hide their mental illness would say something like that.
People being trapped in mental institutions without just cause is a well documented phenomenon.
I know, that’s the dark joke I was making. If you’re against imprisoning the mentally ill, perhaps you’re mentally ill.
Ohhhh 🤭 carry on
How many other bootlicker quotes do you drop on a regular basis?
Only a heartless NIMBY-ist would say something like that.
Outing yourself as an annoying YIMBY
Maybe if you hadn’t axed mental health services in the 80s this paradox wouldn’t have arisen.
Forcing people is always the best way to get good results. 🙄
What’s the other option? Brand them as “undesirables” and let them suffer until they either get help on their own or go on a killing spree? People who are steadfast against law enforcement have been calling for better care for the severely mentally ill so incidents don’t have to end with a shootout. Getting them into care is an important step.
Incentives work better than force.
The trouble with incentives is that addiction is stronger.
Consider an emergency room, where a homeless person has arrived following a cardiac arrest in public. Thr person is revived and recuperating, but they require further help either for mental illness or subtance addiction.
Currently, the best the hospital can do is refer them to treatment, but they cannot compel a patient to seek treatment. If the person leaves the hospital and heads to their dealer, then they will continue to be a burden on society.
Treatment and getting better is the incentive. You’re not going to convince someone to give up drugs or alcohol by offering them tax breaks. Free meals work, but then people will show up just to get the meal, and won’t actually participate in treatment, because nobody can “force” them to be treated.
I honestly don’t know if this law will help with that. I understand the logic of it, but mental health and addiction is an extremely complicated problem. But to say “incentives work better than force” is to ignore the fact that we have incentives, and it’s not working.
Stress is the number one contributing factor to addiction. You know alcoholism is going up in much of the world due to climate change, and going up faster in parts of the world most affected?
Getting someone into housing is an incentive we haven’t tried. Okay, free housing if you get into treatment and take your meds? It reduces stress too, which makes treatment more likely to work. And demonstrates compassion, making therapeutic relationships easier to form and thus, makes treatment more likely to work.
Force doesn’t work. You destroy all trust in the therapupitic process before you even begin.
You are underestimating the type of people this law is targeting. Nobody who is just stressed out is going to be forced into an institution (although I agree the law should be carefully written to guarantee that). This is meant to get people who are full-on batshit insane off the streets and in an environment where they at least have a CHANCE of getting sorted out.
For example, I have a friend who is psychotic. No, I’m not misusing the word or exaggerating, this is a person who is sincerely and obviously psychotic, diagnosed as such by a psychiatrist, sees and hears things that are not there, believes that the government is all rape-demons from hell that are out to harvest our sanity.
When unmedicated, that is.
Once medicated, she is like “holy shit clarity thank god, keep giving me the medicine.” But if there’s ever a lapse, we go right back to the rape-demons from hell trying to force pills down her throat and the only way to save her is to, essentially, violate her by being the rape-demon from hell that forces pills down her throat. Which is of course very illegal but people care enough about her to do it anyway.It would be very nice for it to NOT be illegal to save people from the rape-demons from hell, to have a support system in place aside from what is basically a secret cabal of friends and family as a safety net should this person end up somewhere alone and unable to access their meds.
I think you’re underestimating who this law will target.
Addicts it says. Yes, people with other chronic mental health conditions too. But it sounds to me like California’s plan to deal with the opioid crisis is to start locking addicts in rehab facilities until they figure out how to be treatment wise if they’re not already (this is a term meaning, play the treatment game with therapists without doing the work).
Treatment really requires people to be willing. And unless they’re an immediate danger to themself or others, I don’t agree with forcing people into treatment. On both moral grounds and practical ones.
If this is an alternative to prison or jail, for crimes aside from drug charges, then great! But from what I could gather from the article, this isn’t really what’s going on.
And unless they’re an immediate danger to themself or others, I don’t agree with forcing people into treatment.
The schizoid homeless this law is targeting ARE imminent dangers to themselves and others.
It looks like they are also trying to implement funding for medical treatment as well, which is why the plan can be delayed up to two years.
But there are grey areas to being an immediate danger to themselves or others. If someone is walking into traffic because they are too high to be aware of their surroundings or a schizophrenic homeless man is randomly yelling at people in a park he lives in, there is a danger.
Always amazing to see people who know what they’re talking about getting downvoted all the time. Maybe lemmy really is becoming like that other site.
There are no incentives you can use to entice someone under a psychotic break. You really have no idea what the situation is like. These are not people who have adhd or depression or whatever. They literally do not comprehend reality.
Yeah, if the issue is a growing homeless population, get them housed and use the housing as an incentive for treatment.
Housing first works best with homelessness.
And incentives work better than force for treatment.
But what do I know from my lived experience being homeless because of poor mental health? Or the human services classes I took after getting on my feet?
Apparently much less than people’s gut reactions.
Honestly this bill is more about cleaning up CA homeless problem (and accompanying image) than it is about helping people with mental illness. It ignores best practices, the advice of homeless advocate groups, as well as disability groups.
Incentives work with sane people.
All people respond better to compassion than force
But you can also say no to compassion.
And you can say no to treatment by just playing games with a therapist and pretending to do the work.
Forcing people into mental health care isn’t very effective and we know this. This isn’t about helping the homeless. It’s about CA’s image. Newsom’s image im particular.
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It does but… how are you going to screen everyone, are you going to leave it up to police discretion?
How does that work out most of the time?
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Cool. So if you’re a woman living in a red state that. And your conservative Christian psychiatrist decides you wanting to leave your husband is insane, you’d be cool with being locked up?
Attitudes like this were common in psychiatry not even 100 years ago. 50 years ago being LGB was considered insane. Today, many states would use your law to lock up trans people until they get better. Even now women struggle with medical care because of Drs with outdated views. And people of color don’t trust Drs generally, but you want to give them more power to imprison people? Do you think that would reduce or improve the stigma of mental illness? Do you think it would encourage people to get help? To trust therapists?
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Sometimes we need a proverbial kick in the ass to get moving though this is a very complicated issue. My crazy hoarding obese pain pill addicted neighbor has zero family to help her. She definitely needs someone to intervene but there is no legal way to do so.
There is a not unreasonable argument that allowing the mentally ill to “choose” to become addicted junkies living on the street in an extremely hostile and dangerous environment is not exactly the epitome of merciful empathy.
You’re right, it’s not. Locking them back up isn’t the solution, though.
As a Californian who also works in the ED, there are levels to mental illness. Clearly you haven’t seen the worst of it.
The problem is, how do you ensure this is only used for “the worst of it”?
I have lived on the streets, lived in rooming houses and been a social worker. I have seen the worst, and most often that’s happened when people are forced into compliance … ie: jump through these 20 hoops to be “free”.
Given your experience what do you believe would be a good starting point towards caring for these individuals? What issues and solutions do you see that aren’t addressed? I understand I’m an outsider looking in on this issue, avoiding the mentality ill homeless like many others. But if my vote can go towards a better solutions I’d like to learn about them.
Given your experience what do you believe would be a good starting point towards caring for these individuals?
Housing first, then a guaranteed income. Right along side of those you have mental health workers and health workers visiting daily to assess the individual’s wants and needs. People have to be involved in their own lives, not just told what to do to “cure” themselves.
What issues and solutions do you see that aren’t addressed?
As a society we must stop condemning those who who are different, who don’t operate under the same rules as the gen pop. We have to start understanding that not everyone starts off with the same abilities and benefits, ie: an intact family structure, enough wealth to eat 3 times a day or go on a holiday.
We have to see everyone as valuable simply because they are a human being, and entitled to our respect and care for the same reason.
And we MUST immediately stop believing that money is in any way, shape or form more important than any person’s basic fundamental needs. Money is a tool to be used. People are not.
No one wants to recreate that.
People were invisible, subjected to random unfounded experiments, abused, etc.
There’s an opportunity to keep the program in the light, and get people serious help.
No one wants to recreate that.
Well we the people don’t but I’d be rich if I bet that the police and the governments involved do. Maybe even the healthcare institutions that would be receiving them.
Keep the program in the light
This is it. The modern day ability to record and hold accountable could be used to prevent a return to Institutionalization ala pre-70s America.
Which monstrosity? The one where people with mental health issues but choose not to treat them are left homeless because the state can’t do anything to compel treatment?
Sure is neat what Newsom doesn’t veto.
They’re criminalizing mental illness. That’s California for you.
While this might be an important tool to help many who need it, I can’t help but wonder if this essentially criminalizes opting out of capitalism. Anyone that is homeless and uses drugs or has a mental illness can now be involuntarily committed, denying them the right to decide on that sort of life.
How many people are going homeless while giving themselves a plethora of other issues all in the name of sticking it to capitalism??
Maybe not capitalism in name but some vague idea of “the system”. The system that raised rents and lowered their wages and forced them into homelessness, and continually punishes them for being so. Addiction and other anti-social behaviors could be an act of rebellion against the pressures of this system. Not all of those pressures are capitalistic, some are just basic requirements for any society, but a large chunk of them are.
I have no idea. I’m not suggesting people often become homeless because of ideological reasons, however many do opt out of the rat race and choose not to work and participate economically, which is functionally equivalent.
is CA gonna pay for it?
Why would Canada pay for it?
Cause they are our friendly neighbors to the north, eh? isn’t that what this is all aboot?
Well yeah, who else?
I mean it’s implied that they are going to make the mentally unstable pay for their own forced ‘help’.
What? Where?
Literally how US healthcare works. If you pass out on a street and some kind soul calls you an ambulance, where the hospital has to perform life saving surgery, you’re on the hook for every penny despite all of this happening without your consent. Of course there’s recourse to have most of that debt forgiven because you didn’t choose this, whereas fuck that poor shmuck who elected to have their cancer treated.
In other countries they’re just happy you’re alive and able to walk out in one piece.
California is a little different than the rest of the country.
IS THIS THE EPISODE OF TREE HOUSE OF HORRORS WHERE FLANDERS IS SUPREME LEADER AND LOBOTOMIZES THE TOWN
Love what I’m seeing out of California
the part where smarmy lemmy posters recoil but people with actual drug addiction experience think “hey, yea thats a good idea”. did you guys know there’s a reason you aren’t in charge?
