Homelessness

In the old days, hobos gathered around campfires next to railroad tracks at the edge of town to drink alcohol, eat what they could find, solicit day-labor jobs and continue to die from alcohol related illnesses. In the old days, the mentally ill were confined to government and private hospitals, sometimes for life.

Now the alcoholics, drug addicts and mentally ill are no longer isolated; they are living on main street.  Atlanta has continued to enforce loitering laws and non-profits and churches operate homeless shelters and food banks, but pandering and shopper nuisances are quietly removed. 

The current plague of urban campers in large liberal cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles can be treated by building lock-down mental health facilities to get the homeless off drugs and alcohol and get medicine to manage their other maladies.

Some of these drug addicted folks will need to spend decades in these facilities and should earn their own keep by working while they are locked up. Work is the primary cure for drug addiction and is useful for other maladies.  Some of these patients will have mental illnesses that require that they be locked up permanently.  We used to call these facilities “Insane Asylums” and they were funded by States, Counties and individual Social Security Disability Benefit checks.

In St. Louis Mo., in the 1960s, we had 2 facilities, each with several hundred patients. One was the Insane Asylum for those who were a danger to themselves and others. The other facility was St. Louis State School and Hospital for the retarded. I worked as a Therapist with the retarded as a summer job when I was in college. We had a dairy farm, a school and a swimming pool.  Families visited every Sunday. The Downs’ Syndrome patients were being prepared to work outside and many were released to live at home.

Other hospitals in the 1960s were owned and operated by Catholic Nuns, other churches and charities like Shriners’. Costs were low. These same charities operated old folks’ homes.  Alzheimer’s was called “dementia” and was as common as it is today.

After the closure of US mental hospitals in the 1980s, drug addicts were held in jails, but drugs were smuggled in and jail terms were reduced.  Those with serious mental conditions were expected to have health insurance. Alcoholics struggled to recover without effective treatment and DUI arrests soared.  Welfare immigrants were vulnerable to all of the above. The effectiveness of mental health treatment was rendered ineffective due to restrictive coverage that lowered costs. In the 1980s, drug and alcohol addiction treatment took a year, but was covered in many medical plans. This is no longer the case. These treatments are not limited to 30 days and recovery often involves homelessness.

Now the problem has come full circle. We need to allow families to take care of their disabled if they can, but we also need to restore the institutions we once had to deal with a wider range of mental health problems at higher costs. These facilities need to be owned and operated by private charities if possible.

The definitions of mental illness have been modified by political correctness and the names have been replaced. Manic Depressives are now called Bi-Polar. Some have drug and alcohol addiction as well. Political correctness has redefined sexual orientation as a “right” when it used to be categorized as a mental illness or a felony. Liberals have infiltrated mental health. Gender dystopia is a current fad being promoted by Liberals in education, activist groups and local government. Obamacare opened up transgender surgery as a “medically necessary” coverage.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader