I recently listened to Dr Drew being called a very smart man by Greg gutfeld on an interview where Dr Drew passionately discusses the need for treating mental illness in solving the several million homeless people all around our United States. I’m just going to upload this video and discuss some of my concerns with what I see through the eye of a social worker with many years experience working in psychiatric facilities, School settings, inner cities, and a host of other settings where serious mental illness prevails. as an aside, the man pushing the shopping cart with the bicycle in it, did happen to pass by me and I gave him something cold to drink and a little bit of money. He was able to speak to me and be very thankful but he did not make any eye contact. When I think of the hundreds of thousands of children in special education with serious mental health issues, and serious social skills deficits, including autism, a picture hundreds of thousands of people ending up just like this man. without early intervention and ongoing support, it’s unlikely that we will solve this homeless problem to any significant degree. you may think we could criminalize all these behaviors, and simply put these people in jail. I have worked in a forensics program for a county and I would say something on the order of 99% of the people who end up in jail in prison do not get an appropriate Mental Health diagnosis, or treatment, and you absolutely cannot force these people to get on or stay on their medications. after the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came out in 1975, many of the state hospitals in the state of California and throughout the United States were shut down and probably a million people with serious mental illnesses were allowed to go free. you can only be locked up on an involuntary basis, at least in California on a 5150, or a 72 hour hold, if you are an immediate and imminent danger to yourself, others, or gravely disabled. in other words, if you choose to walk in the snow in your bare feet and eat out of garbage cans and where literally no clothing in the pouring rain, and live under a box, the police cannot take you and involuntarily hospitalize you because you have a right to the least restrictive environment. even if that least restrictive environment is the sidewalks all around our beautiful or I should say once beautiful cities towns and suburbs.
I’m not really proposing that there’s any particular solution to this, because it’s highly complicated and involves changing the laws, offering and mandating in some cases treatment, and ensuring that every single person who has these kinds of needs, or presents themselves to the criminal justice system, gets a Thor ough and compassionate mental health evaluation by somebody who has the depth of experience to spot serious mental illness even though it may not be evident on the surface.
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