Medical use of prescription drugs is rarely the primary reason anyone starts using heroin. Lifetime marijuana use(AOR 2.44), major depression or anxiety(OR 4.43), familial history of drug/alcohol abuse(OR 7.89 ), and PTSD(OR 8.68) are all stronger predictors of opioid abuse than being given an opioid prescription(OR 1.33).
It doesn’t sound like this person is in this situation because of drugs. He may have some mental illness, and he also may just prefer living on the street to conforming in ways that would let him afford housing. It’s hard to know how to help people in his situation while preserving the rights of the taxpayers and property owners who are affected by people camping in public spaces.
I worked for quite a few years in a large homeless shelter in a northeast city. I also got to know a lot of those who came for meals but slept outside. I knew some very intelligent individuals who preferred not to deal with rent, references, taxes, insuranceetc. etc. and sort of lived off the grid. They slept at the shelter and went to the library and parks every day.
You just never know what someone’s life story is , or what is going on in their head, until they tell you. I don’t care if you go to Harvard or Yale, or never finished high school. You might be sufferering from schizophrenia or addiction, lost your job or housing, or have a stronger craving for freedom than most of us.
It could be any of us.
As for California, I have noticed a greater percentage of psychotic folks on the streets, at least in San Diego. Deinstitutionalization never resulted in the promised community care. I feel terrible when I see a barefoot person in the rain, with a wet blanked over the shoulders, muttering to him or herself.
The emphasis needs to be on service for people not on eliminating them as if they are vermin.
What type of service would be offered to the subject of the article that would get him off the street, when he apparently wants to be on the street?
Reasonable question, @roycroftmom . One of my clients was the regional behavioral health authority (oversaw all public mental health services) for a major metro area and it was obvious that lack of services available was only a very small part of the problem. There was counseling, medication, therapy, food, even housing available… but you can’t force people to partake. Part of any of the grants they received for homeless services was spent on vans and outreach for a team to physically go to whereever they could find homeless people and try to convince them to accept counseling, to accept housing, to take their meds (by that point even in a large area most of the SMI - seriously mentally ill - population was already known to the teams). It was a pleasantly futile task.
When the mental hospitals closed there were definitely some community care options that became available. The big issue is getting the population to accept the treatment and care. Very tough to do, especially with certain illness like schizophrenia.
Well, there are certainly not ENOUGH community care options. 
It took several years to get my son into one, and that was with a lot of hard work on my part. If someone doesn’t have an advocate, good luck.
Agree. The community care is very patchwork and there’s an element of randomness in whether you fall into it, whether you can find it and whether it has openings/availability. It also appears to be largely driven by private advocates. So certain areas have better facilities or providers for treating certain issues depending on who in the community values a certain issue. Not unlike education. Very frustrating.
It would seem, @milee30, that the subject can decline alternate services and lodging because he has a reasonable (to him) legal alternative of living on the street. If that option were no longer available to him, presumably he would either partake of the offers or seek other solutions. California cities are known for offering many social service options. If the subject refuses them all, why is he permitted to use sidewalk space for a purpose for which it is not intended?
Yes, exactly. That’s the crux of the issue. Most communities haven’t figured out how to keep common areas clean and usable for the nonhomeless population while not infringing on the rights of the homeless, in many communities drug addicted and/or mentally ill population.
Years ago there was no question - the right of the many were considered more important than the individual liberty or free will of any one person so it was an easy choice to institutionalize (jail, hospital, institution, whatever). Now the pendulum has swung waaaaay out to the other side where we consider the individual liberties more important than anything, to the detriment of losing public spaces and amenities to what essentially amounts to a ‘taking’ by squatters. All this is exacerbated by the programs that feed, provide needles, and in a dozen other ways make life on the streets or in the subway station quite bearable. I suspect some time in the future, there will be enough backlash from nonhomeless citizens that more of a balance is achieved. Help – food, medicine, shelter provided, but in ways that don’t encourage squatting and taking over public spaces.
The opportunities afforded this person were immense. He chose his path and I have no empathy for him nor is he asking for any. I am far more concerned about people who have had no opportunities.
Mandatory shelter seems a lot like… jail, prison, or involuntary institutionalization.
Perhaps call such a proposal as it is, making it explicitly illegal to be homeless, punishable by imprisonment. But then that would increase jail, prison (or other institutionalization) costs to be borne by all taxpayers.
I think there is a case working its way up to the Supreme Court on just that issue. That is, if a city has shelter space, can it make livivg on the sidewalk illegal. The case is from Boise but L A just voted to file a friend of the court brief.
Its not jail. They could leave a shelter at any time. Just no more illegal camping in parks or on sidewalks.
I think a lot of people have preconceptions about who is homeless and why. This man probably breaks that mold for many which is what makes this a story.
He is an addict, and that almost certainly keeps him out of shelters. He struggles with mental health issues. While he is smart and educated, those 2 things have probably made it hard for him to hold a job.
I am only surprised that anyone would think an Ivy League degree would confer immunity from this kind of problem. I have had a handful of friends with these “excellent credentials” take their own lives and we hear of students at top schools doing the same. That’s another riff on this story. He sounds like he still has hope.
Of course, what if the homeless person refuses to go to the shelter, or leaves the shelter and returns to now-illegal living on the street? Then is the solution to put him/her in (more expensive to taxpayers) jail?
Probably that is the reason that this thread got started in the first place. Do you think that it would be posted here if, instead of “Yale”, it were “University of New Haven” or “Southern Connecticut State”?
The case is Martin v. City of Boise.
I’ve known two Yalies very well who “fell apart.” One killed himself in his early 40s, the other drank himself to death well before he smashed into a concrete wall in his mid-40s. Neither really became homeless, though a few more years and they could have I guess.
I know another Yalie from the same class as the first one who is now worth more than $10 billion (yes, billion) based on some outsized early career risks he took that paid off “bigly.” Sadly, I know him quite a bit less well…
Life is strange that’s for sure.
Police just arrested a man on four outstanding warrants who had been burning a campfire in the hills near my neighborhood. This is an extreme, present danger to the lives and property of thousands. I don’t care if he is addicted or mentally ill. There is no excuse. The rest of us have rights too.
I used to buy breakfast for a homeless guy semi-regularly when I worked in New York. Sometimes he would offer to buy me breakfast. He was a very personable sort and easy to talk to. He had been on the streets 15 years. During that time he had spent 2 nights in homeless shelters. He said that as dangerous as sleeping on the subway or in parks and doorways was he felt much safer doing so than sleeping in the shelters. In those two nights in a shelter he witnessed a stabbing and multiple fist fights that broke out over theft and accusations of theft.
I try not to judge and think there but for the grace of God go I. My own opinion is that we are failing as a society. For whatever reason or reasons there will always be some who do chose to live a homeless existence but when we have homelessness in the numbers we do right now something is fundamentally wrong, something that goes far beyond personal choice.
So, jail then?