New York City to Remove Mentally Ill People From Streets Against Their Will

[AngryOldDem]

14. Actually, the bottom line is that society treats this community like flotsam and jetsam.

The places where they could be safe and get the help they needed are mostly closed. Case management services are overloaded and understaffed. Wait times for government assistance are ridiculous. People with no formal training in psychiatry or psychology (like me and my coworkers) have to deal with emergency situations that we hope we won’t make worse.

Some people cannot function outside a controlled environment. Hard truth. Many don’t have families that are willing or able to care for them. So society’s answer to this is to keep moving them around, hoping to keep them invisible, and to make them somebody else’s problem. It is a massively cruel and failed policy.

(As bad as the mental health aspect of this is, people with physical health problems get treated just as poorly, especially now that most hospitals are for-profit.)