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I found my father living on the street

bbc.co.uk

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Re: I found my father living on the street

#91

Post by chris_wot »

herbert_cassidy wrote: post #56
SpaghettiCat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people don't have control over their mental faculties; they aren't competent enough to make a choice for what is best for them in the same way that minors aren't allowed to go truant or to consent to sex with an adult. If you are all there in the head, by all means live on the streets, stay filthy, don't eat and ignore people, but this man has a brain disease that makes him lose control of his mind. If he was f…

I think this is the problem left-wing/liberal/socialist thinking. It sounds great - nobody should be on the streets - we have enough resources to house everyone. And then a little while later it's some kind of totalitarian nightmare with people forced to live in institutions as you think you know better for them, and anyone who doesn't agree with your way of life must be insane.

Enough with plotting some sort of opinion on a simplistic and inadequate two-dimemsional political axis! It's almost never helpful.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#92

Post by [deleted] »

kriro wrote: post #86

I think it's very unethical that she published the initial pictures without consent (from what I understand, sounds like he didn't know the pictures until she showed him when he was better) even if she is a family member and did it "in good faith" and even when he gave her implicit permission after the fact. I also can't help but wonder why she didn't bring him to a hospital when she first saw him in the streets. I'm…

[deleted]

Re: I found my father living on the street

#93

Post by SpaghettiCat »

DanBC wrote: post #84
SpaghettiCat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Schizophrenia is a lifelong illness. Do you keep someone imprisoned for the rest of their life so that you can forcibly medicate them against their will? No, until the mental disorder is controlled. After all avenues of curing are exhausted, and it's still not under control, then they can be released, provided there's no significant risk that they'll harm others or themselves.

Schizophrenia is not cured, but treated. So you risk getting into "revolving door" admissions to hospital. A person with a psychosis becomes ill, rejects medication, is detained against their will in hospital and given medication against their will (sometimes by force) until they "become well" enough to be let out of hospital. At which point they're free to decide to stop taking the medication. I'm not sure that this…

This already happens with homeless people: they become diseased, malnourished, get drunk and hurt themselves. Once the trauma has reached a certain degree that they require hospitalisation, they end up in hospital and released once they've recovered. Are you proposing we not help them at all and just let them fester and die on the streets?

Surely not. The "revolving door" concept, as you call it, is the middle-ground between not helping at all, thus letting a mentally ill person reach trauma more severe, and permanently confining those with incurable mental disorders (but those which can be controlled, and the patient able to live healthily outside the ward), which is both wildly expensive and harder to justify overruling the patient's will and freedom.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#94

Post by DanBC »

[deleted] wrote: post #92
kriro wrote: post #86

I think it's very unethical that she published the initial pictures without consent (from what I understand, sounds like he didn't know the pictures until she showed him when he was better) even if she is a family member and did it "in good faith" and even when he gave her implicit permission after the fact. I also can't help but wonder why she didn't bring him to a hospital when she first saw him in the streets. I'm…

[deleted]

US laws about when someone can be detained in hospital against their will vary by state.

You're right that it tends to require immediate risk of harm to other people or to yourself. (And harm to yourself tends to mean risk of death. Self harm, even severe self harm, with no intent to die would usually not be something people are detained for. (Although I don't know much about the US systems.))

Re: I found my father living on the street

#95

Post by SpaghettiCat »

chris_wot wrote: post #85
SpaghettiCat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every mental disorder warrants institutionalisation; I never said that. My point was to clarify that a medically diagnosed person who does some crazy action should be institutionalised, whereas a person who does the exact same crazy action but has no mental disorders should not be.

Define "crazy action"? And under what mental disorder should someone be institutionalised? All you've referred to is the DSM, so it's very unclear which illnesses and disorders you are referring to. Incidentally, are you aware that there is a difference between a mental disorder and a mental illness?

By "crazy action" I mean for 2 years wilfully undereating, not washing, living in filth, not responding to basic communication (even to your own daughter) and standing for long stretches of time at road intersections.

>And under what mental disorder should someone be institutionalised?

Under those that are responsible for causing a person to suffer and damage their own health and fail to try to recover, or seek help with recovery, as in the example above.

>All you've referred to is the DSM, so it's very unclear which illnesses and disorders you are referring to.

You've taken this comment thread on a totally different tangent. We're arguing a wholly different point now.

> Incidentally, are you aware that there is a difference between a mental disorder and a mental illness?

No, wasn't aware. I use them interchangeably.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#96

Post by chris_wot »

SpaghettiCat wrote: post #95
chris_wot wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "crazy action"? And under what mental disorder should someone be institutionalised? All you've referred to is the DSM, so it's very unclear which illnesses and disorders you are referring to. Incidentally, are you aware that there is a difference between a mental disorder and a mental illness?

By "crazy action" I mean for 2 years wilfully undereating, not washing, living in filth, not responding to basic communication (even to your own daughter) and standing for long stretches of time at road intersections. >And under what mental disorder should someone be institutionalised? Under those that are responsible for causing a person to suffer and damage their own health and fail to try to recover, or seek help…

I haven't actually taken this on a different tangent. You literally wrote that you would only institutionalize those with a mental illness that is in the DSM, when questioned you said only certain illnesses would apply, so now I'm asking what illnesses and disorders you believe apply.

There are a group of people in Australia called Ferals. They don't eat well, and they never bathe. They do it out of choice. I'm sure some of them are mentally ill. I wouldn't be locking them up in an institution!

Re: I found my father living on the street

#97

Post by kriro »

chris_wot wrote: post #89
kriro wrote: post #86

I think it's very unethical that she published the initial pictures without consent (from what I understand, sounds like he didn't know the pictures until she showed him when he was better) even if she is a family member and did it "in good faith" and even when he gave her implicit permission after the fact. I also can't help but wonder why she didn't bring him to a hospital when she first saw him in the streets. I'm…

She couldn't. You cannot make someone go to a hospital if they aren't harming themselves or others.

Well you can try. From the post it sounds like she "just" (it was obviously not easy) walked away. I don't see that she involved a psychiatrist or tried to get outpatient treatment (whatever that is called in the US) awarded. AFAIK the latter can be gotten if the person is diagnosed and not living safely, I'd say that's certainly possible. http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/legal-resources/hawai...

I'm probably misunderstanding the post but she had no problem publishing the pictures initially and talks a lot about how hard everything was for her. Apart from the happy end there isn't much about "what did I do to change the situation for him". The time spans are odd, seems like she "just" went on with her life and let him wander about until he finally collapsed.

Once again I'm not trying to say she's heartless or anything but the post is fairly gut wrenching to read. There's too little information on the concrete steps taken to help him.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#98

Post by zeveb »

Symbiote wrote: post #24
skrebbel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always had the idea that homelessness numbers were way higher in the US than in the Netherlands. This helped keep me firmly on my high horse (I'm Dutch too). Was I wrong?

According to [1], the Netherlands has about 0.16% homeless people per capita, and the USA 0.50-1.10%. (If I'm comparing figures correctly, since that page has "counted on one night" and "total for the year" for different countries.) It's probably significant that a lot of the US is a lot warmer year-round. [1] https://www.homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics/#eu...

> It's probably significant that a lot of the US is a lot warmer year-round.

Yup, exactly this. It's why there are so many homeless folks in Hawaii: it's easy to live there without shelter. Living in a part of the world where the weather gets cold forces people to make decisions.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#99

Post by harrumph »

SpaghettiCat wrote: post #6

What kind of society lets a mentally ill man roam the streets, deteriorating, instead of institutionalising him and helping him recover?

>What kind of society lets a mentally ill man roam the streets, deteriorating, instead of institutionalising him and helping him recover?

A society pathologically obsessed with markets, blind to the priceless.

Re: I found my father living on the street

#100

Post by LordKano »

vidarh wrote: post #46
SpaghettiCat wrote: post #6

What kind of society lets a mentally ill man roam the streets, deteriorating, instead of institutionalising him and helping him recover?

Many other good answers, but here's an anecdote: In Oslo, near the university, there used by a "cave dweller". A by all accounts bright student who at 25 decided to stop washing himself. He was soon thrown out of his student accommodation because of the smell. He then decided to take up residence under a tarp in a makeshift "cave" in a hillside next to the university where he stayed for the following two and half dec…

I had to coerce a friend into getting mental help.

He had made some self-destructive statements and a mutual friend reached out to me for help. Several of us scheduled an intervention to try to convince him to go get help and the day before the intervention, he made some more self-destructive statements so that same mutual friend called me and I went to his apartment. He looked like death warmed over. He hadn't been taking care of himself and was extremely thin and pale.

When I asked him to go to a hospital for help, he refused. I told him that I wasn't going to take no for an answer. He had been talking about harming himself and that's all we needed to have him involuntarily committed for 72 hours. He still didn't want to go so I called the police and explained that my friend had been talking about hurting himself and I thought he needed to be committed.

He even threatened that if I followed this course of action, it would mean the end of our friendship. I said that I would prefer to be able to drive past the place where I was no longer welcome than to drive past the place where my friend died because I didn't help him.

The police and paramedics came and the officers explained to me that because of his talk of self-harming, he could be involuntarily committed if he didn't go of his own volition. If he was right and there was "nothing" wrong with him, he could be out of the hospital in the morning.

Their argument persuaded him and he went voluntarily.

He was in the hospital for over a week. Long story short, his problem was caused by the side effect of a medication he was taking for a medical condition. They were able to find a different medicine that helped his condition without producing the side effect of depression. He's doing well today and we're still friends.

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