[pachyderm]

How Hospitals Respond When Mentally Ill People Come in From the Streets - The New York Times

This week, Mayor Eric Adams announced his own initiative to bring more people with severe mental illness to hospitals for evaluations against their will. He said it would apply to homeless people who, because of their illness, were unable to meet their basic needs and were therefore a danger to themselves — a standard the Boggs case set.

In some respects not much has changed in the intervening years in how hospitals respond to schizophrenia and street homelessness.

Haldol is still commonly administered at Bellevue and other hospitals today. And just as they have for decades, psychiatrists still wrestle with whether someone is a danger to themselves, and what factors to consider, when deciding to admit someone involuntarily.

How much help will you get if you are admitted?

[splitimage]

A lot of the issues identified in the article are the same here, except for the insurance issue. But there's definitely a shortage of psychiatric beds and I know the largest psychiatric hospital here regularly discharges people back to the streets where the cycle just continues.

[Truth22]

In some States it's extremely difficult to involuntarily detain someone for mental illness. They have to have a plan to die by suicide or threaten to harm someone. If they don't admit it to crisis response person or police, the police have to see the pills in their hands as they are about to take it or the knife in their hand as they are about to harm someone. It's like that in Washington State for example; and minors 13 years of age and older have the same rights as adults. So parents can't make them go to counseling or take their medication unless there is a difficult to get court order. I know people who have had to deal with this.

Originally Posted by splitimage

A lot of the issues identified in the article are the same here, except for the insurance issue. But there's definitely a shortage of psychiatric beds and I know the largest psychiatric hospital here regularly discharges people back to the streets where the cycle just continues.

I'm guessing it continues because the homeless person cannot afford the medication?

And even if they had money, the priority would normally be food?

Not sure why they can't (in this country and the USA) build hotel-like buildings and put one homeless person in each room and help them get work (if they are able to work) or money coming in if they cant work

might be getting off topic now idk

willowtigger shh