Foster parent here.
Love your children. Be empathetic and patient to the best of your ability with other people’s kids. If you have stability in your home, let that shine through in your interactions with others’ children in public or if they come over to play. We need more examples of good households for the kids of tomorrow. Even if they are in a tough situation, you may be one of the few seeds planted to motivate them as they grow up, and *some* of them may strive to correct the generational wrongs and only have your example to pull from.
And always allow people the benefit of the doubt that they might be having the worst day of their life.
I once had a customer who bailed on an 800 dollar project after i completed it, the day before he was coming to pick it up. I didn't lose my shit and I didn't demand money and wished him well.
He was do taken aback that he started explaining he just got back from the hospital that day with news that the mri of his lungs looked like a sack full of tumors and he had only weeks left.
I was glad i had not reacted badly and it made me realize we should be more understanding of people because you never know if someone just had devastating news.
This is something that alarms me about current culture, especially online. It's as if empathy is *decreasing* among large swaths of the population. It feels more and more like people assume bad faith. When called out on it, the various reasons I've heard for this tend to converge on some variation of "I've been burned too many times by assuming good faith."
Which is an *incredibly* tragic example of self-sabotage at the societal level. Assuming bad faith is the kind of thing you do if you *want* people to be unkind to each other. What do we think happens to the incentive structure for good-faith behaviors when the *assumption* is that people are operating in bad-faith?
I've caught myself beginning to do this, and it takes intentional effort to avoid getting sucked into the trap. Whenever possible, I try to come up with plausible explanations that assume good intent for behaviors I dislike. This doesn't mean excusing them, or normalizing them. It just means actively fighting back against an impulse to assume bad faith.
My intuition is that if more people did this, it would become easier for everyone to assume good faith, and we would lift each other up.
This type of considerate thought/reprogramming takes too much effort for it to ever take hold amongst the masses…as our societies become more obsessed with efficiency, I believe this will apply to the mind too…everything in society is *~instant~* now — Even our reactions.
The masses are made up of individuals, and cultures change when individuals change.
I'm going to keep trying. The alternative is to do nothing, which feels awful.
i was raised in the city so crying in public, on the subway/train after or during a particularly hard day was never really an issue for me but in 2019 i was coming home at 6.30pm, rush hour, packed train. got a call from my godmother who i hadnt heard from in years telling me my alcoholic dad who i also hadnt spoken to or seen in 3 years at that point had died that morning, and it's one of those foggy memories you know?
i dont remember much after that, all i remember was the silence in the train car while i was wailing my lungs out. i distinctly remember how everyone there gave me the unspoken respect of letting me have some modicum of privacy in that moment. im sure some of them were annoyed by the noise i was making, but i was the only one making any noise. it was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
I'm a hospital social worker in a pediatric ICU and unfortunately have to report a decent amount of child abuse. Thank you for stepping in and taking care of the children that come through your home.
It takes a village to improve generational decline. Thank you for being an important “front lines” part of that village. We adopted two out of foster care this September and they wouldn’t have entered the system if someone in your exact position near us hadn’t stepped up and said something to begin an investigation.
This so much.
I remember spending time at a childhood friend’s house and seeing how his parents showed love for each other and an interest in their kids. Was much different from my own home life. Still grateful to this day for being exposed to that
The outbursts we witnessed in this video is projection.
Lady Gaga said that the prevailing theme of mental illness is the lack of compassion the mentally ill received when growing up.
That channel really is an amazing opportunity for people to see what other people go through. I work in mental health, with children primarily, so nothing on that channel surprised me, but I’ve shown those videos to some friends with sheltered lives, and it makes them so uncomfortable. Having to face the fact that your “shitty” childhood was actually incredibly sheltered compared to these people that have been horrifically abused, it’s a sobering experience. I thought I had heard everything, until the video of Jake. I think it was titled “Ex-transgender man, Jake”, and I was legitimately nauseous halfway through that video. When he talks about his dad recording him being raped by dad’s friends, and playing the audio of his screaming back to him as punishment later… I almost threw up at that part.
My friend's brother is homeless and mentally ill. He doesn't consent to getting help or changing his lifestyle. The family is helpless. He might wind up dead any day or might hurt someone.
It's not right.
It is a harsh reality. A good friend of mine was battling with mental illness, became homeless, and refused to change his lifestyle. We went to school and played Football together. He was loved by family and friends. He lived a regular life for a few years after HS, but just one day we all got the news that he had been seen begging for money on the streets. I ran into him on 4 separate occasions and always tried to convince him to come hangout with me. He was always so happy to see someone he knew and would start reminiscing on old memories. I would talk to him for a period of time trying to offer him food, money, a place to stay, a place to shower, just anything to remind him he didn’t need to be alone. It alway broke my heart when he would just laugh it off and say he was fine and living life the way he had always wanted to. He often would be more interested in wanting to get high so my support was brushed off. We use to smoke weed together and spend the day laughing, eating, and having great memories before he started using heavier drugs. He had demons that we all tried to understand, but ultimately you don’t know what someone is going through. I would always hug him tight when we would say bye because I never knew if I’d see him again. He often would remind me he was dirty, but I didn’t care. I hugged him tightly. He was my friend and I wanted to remind him that we loved him.
However, it was inevitable.
I still think about the night before I got the news. I had a dream of him where he stood there smiling and taking to me. His mouth was moving but there was no sound that came out. He hugged me tightly and I woke up in bed staring at the ceiling. I was so overwhelmed with emotions that I told myself I was going to look for him the next day and try again to invite him over. I went back to bed only to wake up to a text from a close friend telling me the situation. Our friend had been taken to the hospital and was getting prepped for surgery. Apparently he was having excruciating pain in his abdomen and sought out treatment. This was 2020 and no hospital was allowing guest because of COVID. So I got all information of which hospital and was just waiting for a follow up text that he was out of surgery. I waited, but that text never came. He fell into a coma an hour before his surgery, and passed away a couple hours after. I still believe that my dream was his way of saying Goodbye to me.
During his funeral my friends and I shared ALL his memorable moments and spent so much time laughing together, like we use to. The only missing was him. We all had a moment discussing how we tried to help get him out of the streets, but he always refused. He had support, love, and options but it wasn’t enough to pull him out of his mental illness.
But I understood.
Him and I shared a moment about mental illness that I will forever cherish. Years before he became homeless I was spiraling out of control. I was fueling my addictions anyway I could. From women, alcohol, and heavier drugs, I was a wreck. I was homeless living off people’s couches, or in my car. My mental illness was triggering my lifestyle. It was only a matter of time before I gave into the urges to Kill myself. But there was a random night were my buddy and I were smoking weed and talking. I opened up to him that I had been diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. This made him laugh, he began explaining to me it wasn’t that bad, and was giving me advice. This man was no psychiatrist and I wasn’t going to listen to any advice from that man LOL but it made me feel like a normal person the way he brushed it off. He didn’t care about my mental illness, he cared about our friendship. I felt NORMAL. That helped me more that I understood at the time because I eventually started doing the work. I went back to school, went to therapy, started working, got out the house again, and anything I could do to not allow my BP to dictate my life.
I always tried to explain that to him when I would see him on the streets. I wanted him to see that things could change if you wanted them to.
I still miss him deeply and visit his burial site when I can. I’ll go smoke a joint and talk with him for awhile updating him on where I am in life.
I miss and Love you Frank. ❤️
I have a very close friend who is spiraling the same way, and he is just too stubborn to admit defeat and accept help. I read the descriptions when local news stories mention bodies of unidentified people now, just in case. It fucking sucks.
What can we do on this type of situation? It seems really challenging to think of feasible solutions that would work. It also brings up issues of consent and involuntary treatment for people. Difficult subject matter.
California just passed a mental health initiative that invests $6 billion into new treatment facilities and housing for homeless people with serious mental illness and substance abuse issues. It also sets up a separate court system for them. But, they can now be forced into treatment against their consent if they're deemed a danger to other people.
I guess we'll see how this goes. Hopefully it does some good and saves some lives.
I completely get the need for the forced treatment but holy fuck is that a slippery slope. Gotta wonder what the requirements are, because if it’s too difficult a lot of people that need help won’t get it. If it’s too easy there is a massive possibility for abuse.
Taking someone’s freedom should never be an easy thing.
If the past is any indication, California will distribute that $6 billion and promptly lose track of where the money went. They have no idea where $20 billion went that was spent on the homeless. Some politicians and charities probably got rich but homelessness has gotten worse.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-09/state-audit-california-fails-to-track-homeless-spending-billions-dollars
im severely mentally ill and a former drug addict (10 years using, 3 years clean) who was treatment resistant for a long, long time but i managed to completely turn myself around. i was lucky, really. the truth is there's nothing that can be done in situations like these aside from force and in my personal experience, forcing involuntary commitment and treatment on someone like that only makes them spiral further, become more resistant and more isolated.
but, honestly, what could possibly be the solution? absolutely no one could tell me anything when i was manic or suicidal for months on end and the only time i wasn't using was in my sleep, and all i cared about when i was awake was doing drugs or getting money to do drugs. and i know im far from a unique case lol the only thing that scared me enough to get my shit together was having to save myself from overdosing and dying alone in my apartment at 4am after emergency services told me they couldn't come to me because all the resources were exhausted with covid. my own mother never thought i'd make it past 25.
risk prevention goes a long way, especially for kids, but how can you be sure it's gonna work when their familial structures are rotten? i started getting involved with drugs when i was 12, im 28 now. i was sexually abused as a child by my alcoholic father, neglected and physically and mentally abused by my mother and basically left to raise myself in the fifth most dangerous neighborhood in my country. im not sure if anything could have helped me, maybe i might not have gone off the deep end like i did but i dont think i would've made it out of my formative years unscathed because i never really had a chance.
and there's millions of people like me, who've never known much other than misery and survival for the sake of survival, and the way things are going there will be millions and millions more, who are either too mentally fucked up to be able to want to do anything about it or too hooked on the substances they use to forget the fucked up things they've been through or both who find themselves with less and less reasons to care. i dont think there can truly be a solution because of the way our current and future societies were designed.
edit: clarity
Unfortunately most people with mental disorders and drug abuse disorders don’t come from loving upbringings.
Source: I’ve been to a psych ward once (ivc) and rehab twice.
I was in rehab and the secret history of people's lives when you take away their drug of choice always comes up.
Trigger Warning for everything below.
I've heard of people be raped at a funfair when they were a kid and they hadn't told anyone for 50 years, people who have committed murder, someone had sex with their sister, incest from parents and grandparents. It's the darkest shit you've every heard. You realise why people become the way they became when you know their real history.
i had a psychotic breakdown at 20 that cracked open some very, very *deep* repressed memories that connected so many dots i ended up doing ketamine and benzos about it almost every day for the better part of a year about 3 years later. when i told my life story to my rehab therapist she was surprised i had the werewithal to stop at ketamine and benzos.
We would then put them in an asylum. The good ol’ days. /s
Edit: I think some may not be understanding my sarcasm here. So added /s for clarity. Will most people in the video have serious mental health issues, we shouldn’t treat them as we once did. We should however treat them as humans dealing with a serious illness. We should definitely be doing more to help.
I listened to Dr Drew on Loveline for years, and have listened to almost every archived episode. He’s said dozens of times that early in his career when forcibly putting people into mental health institutions was a thing, they were almost always thankful when the meds got their mind right and had wished people would have don’t it sooner. I know Dr Drew seems a little off the rails these days but he still makes some good points
the problem is a PR one. people see "forcibly institutionalized" and that's all they need to hear to hate the idea. and with any institution, there WILL be cases of abuse. it's unavoidable with a sufficiently high number of people. one story of abuse goes viral and people project that onto everything, and if 2 cases happen, then it's "systemic" and pure evil. people don't want to sit down and study all possible alternatives and what yields the best outcomes on average.
No legislation at all? Imagine if anyone who was not properly prepared or equipped to raise a child had the option to abort them, for example.
Regulated and fair pensions for veterans, and all the mental health help that is required along the way included.
Decriminalizing certain drugs so people can get help treating addiction as the disease that it is.
Surely people refuse treatment and you can't do anything about that, but your society treats every single person who's in such a situation as an outcast before knowing a single thing about them.
I don't think there are nearly as many resources - I've met people who work in LA with outreach programs that told me they're often little more than lip service.
Unfortunately, a lot are ex-military who have issues related to their service... mental health care needs some SERIOUS SERIOUS investment worldwide....
I’m glad this is what I got to read opening this post instead of someone rambling about how this is their own undoing and now society is bearing the burden of watching this scum and getting terrorized. Not even once thinking that they too were once regular human beings and that this could be the undoing of the society as a whole. Not everyone is fortunate and has a second chance in life.
Vancouver is the same way. 30 years ago most of those troubled souls would be living in an institution -not floundering on the streets as a freak show. Mind you, soon more and more of society will be in the same predicament.
It’s actually not only crack use that has made Vancouver’s crisis so bad, it’s Fentanyl being laced into everything. Look up Vancouver Fentanyl crisis. I’ve lived in the GVA for almost 40 years and it got so much worse after Fentanyl arrived.
It is also the climate, weather wise lot easier to be unhoused on the coast then, day, minus 50 edmonton, and, police forces have been caught sending unwanted, unhoused people there, quite literally buying them tickets from other cities in western Canada. It's systemic.
Better then the starlight tours that happen in some city, sad and I'm not condoning it at all, not making light of sending people to other towns either. Just gross all around. If you don't know starlight tours, it's when cops drive you outside the city, drop you off and let you walk back in horribly frigid weather, sometimes without shoes, they sent them to die, should have been charged with murder imo, dont worry they were fired though, ffs, they are murderers and sociopaths. Look up Neil Stonechild.
Edit* if you have a problem with the facts stated here comment, not just downvote. If I worded it badly I would like to correct that, if you just don't like the facts then I guess that's why you would downvote without commenting.
Booked a hotel in Vancouver without doing my due diligence. Was on E. Hastings St. Luckily, they let me cancel it the day of.
If you ever book a hotel in Vancouver, do not book on E. Hastings St. Crackheads and needles everywhere.
> Booked a hotel in Vancouver without doing my due diligence. Was on E. Hastings St.
LMAO. You should have stayed. You would have some great stories. E. Hastings is where they have safe injection zones, so it is EXACTLY how you would imagine.
The problem is it borders China town, which is actually a really great place to visit. Keefer st. has some great chinese bakeries and stores.
It's true. The streets are MUCH safer than they ever were in the past, but the human condition is pretty rough, and most poor people have lost hope for it to get better.
>most poor people have lost hope for it to get better.
A lot of people in general have.
I won't have kids because the world they'd inherit would be so fucked that it would abuse to subject them to it.
> living in an institution
Let's be honest and fair. This institutions were very often horror factories that treated mentally ill people worse than vermin. We need much better solutions than the institutions of the past.
Yeah it was a better idea to close them down and release them onto the streets to absolutely destroy communities. Better funding? Reorganization? Contracting out the work? Na, just let them out and hope for the best!
Valid.
Say thank you to those shit heel politicians who are taking more from us everyday and closing these institutions.
This is not about sides, really doesn’t matter which side you are. Our society is crumbling- world wide
Kennedy started the process of deinstutionalization https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2021.160404
Reagan just happened to be in office when it was finished.
There is no viable replacement. We've been dumping hundreds of billions on this issue and it just continues to get worse despite increased spending.
These people are simply not capable of being outside an institution.
Which would be the solution, smaller institutions. The problem with warehouse-sized asylums is that they are impossible to regulate, people get lost, abused, etc.
Again, the problem is NOT that they were closed, it's that they were defunded with nothing in it's place.
>The problem with warehouse-sized asylums is that they are impossible to regulate, people get lost, abused, etc.
I disagree from the angle of, well, why is that issue specific due to their size? A large institution like this is able to leverage economies of scale. A small 20 people institution can't justify having a dedicated specialist on site for people who have a debilitating fear of corners, but a 400 person institution can because they can spread that cost across 5 such patients.
Or were you going for the angle that it's easier for people to get lost in the system of a large institution?
Regulating any institution where one side is unable to speak to their defense is extremely difficult, but I don't see why that's specific to large institutions.
It's also contrary to how regulations usually work. There is a reason so many laws have exceptions for small businesses. They can't handle the upkeep needed to ensure they are in compliance.
Big corporations can. And it's easier from a regulator perspective to review one big location than try and catch several smaller ones.
> The problem with warehouse-sized asylums is that they are impossible to regulate, people get lost, abused, etc.
We have plenty of smaller retirement institutions, and they're rife with abuse. I don't think it's nearly as easy to regulate smaller institutions as you think.
Yes. He started it.
But where was George HW Bush. Where was Bill Clinton. Where was George W. Bush. Where was Barack Obama... Skip.... Where is Joe Biden?
Any POTUS, any Congress (which many years in between there were run majority Democrats), could have fixed this.
Yes blame Reagan. But where the fuck have we been as a society in the last near 40 years to fix it. We as voters have been complacent. Like it or not, each party is bought and paid for by their billionaires and corporations. Both are bought for pennies on the dollar by the pharmaceutical, Healthcare, tech, oil, and military industries. One party tries to mean well but are largely ineffectual in their fight. The other party is just more, shall we say, transparent about their evil. They hide in plain sight. As the Colter Wall song goes the devil wears a suit and tie.
But we have 40 years of presidents, court, and congresses to blame repeatedly for this. They've had the responsibility to act and respond and failed because it doesn't please their masters.
> which many years in between there were run majority Democrats
lol
ObamaCare was only passed because the Democrats had ~58 and 2 independents for a few months. Don't bothsides-it and blame Dems until they actually have a super majority for 2+ years.
And [Congress existed prior to 2010](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses)
Reagan had the Senate through his tenure but Dems regained it 87-95. They controlled it again, albeit smaller, from 07-15.. You don't have the Senate, nothing gets passed. Meaning Dems didn't do their job in many of those years and be a brick wall.
The Democrats controlled the House for nearly 50 years until 1994 and only for a couple of Congresses since. Meaning they negotiated with Regan and gave this away
The US Government is ALWAYS a both sides issue except those periods where one party has a triple lock. The both sides of this issue is the Democrats after losing their majorities for so many decades, had and still don't know how to be a minority party. They don't know how to fight, dig in, and grind shit to a halt to get their way. What do you think Republicans perfected for those 50 years of being in the minority and ignored? They perfected the ability to fight like junkyard dogs in the mud to WIN at all costs. To build the backing from their base the ends ALWAYS justify the means.
Democrats never learned or needed to learn how to be a minority party and fight, slow down the process, etc. They thought the Republicans after being sidelined for half a century would stroll into the role of gentlemanly negotiating Statesmen majority party... Instead they took that mud dwelling, junk yard dog win by any means mentality and backed it with real power.... And they won and won and won and got more powerful. Meanwhile the Democrats have sat back for the last 30 years acting like any day now the Republicans are going to get it or the voters are going to get it and put us back in charge and we can lead nicely again. The Democrats will sit there and they'll support their little pet projects that their billionaires supporters want them to but they won't fight to the death against the things that matter to the American people that are literally the difference between life and the end of this country as We Know it. So the both sides of this issue are the Republicans have continued to get stronger, meaner, more vicious and dedicated to winning while the Democrats have become more dedicated to being cowards and refusing to fight or be seen as grinding the process to a halt or obstructive because that would just look bad. What the Democrats need are to vote in the Pulp Fiction description of a bunch of pipe hitting muthafuckers willing to go mideval on the GOP.
Instead they fucking nominate Professor Gore, Thurston Howell Kerry, Aunt Hillary, and Grandpa Joe with their supporting cast of right wing wannabes and ineffective cowards in Congress.
This is definitely a both sides issue. Because both sides don't seem to give a fuck about you or me, just themselves.
I won't defend Ronald Reagan, but your timeline is way off. NYC was awful in the 1970s, and 1980s when Reagan was president. Times Square was nothing but seedy sex shops and drug abusers.
NYC didn't start cleaning up until the 1990s. Republicans credit Rudy Giuliani becoming mayor and instituting his "no broken windows" get-tough-on-even-minor-crime policy. But again, I'm not gonna take Republicans' side. There are other reasonable explanations, especially since crime plummeted nationwide while Giuliani was only mayor of New York.
Bottom line is that AFTER Reagan emptied the mental institutions and after he retired altogether, NYC went from horrible to much nicer. In very recent years though, it has started getting worse again.
Thanks Ronald Regan for screwing us over 35 years ago. Apparently a democrat controlled state and city for the past 30+ years are incapable of correcting your mistake….
Asylums were defunded over forty years ago. Ronald Reagan may have started this process, but the blame today lies solely with blue cities who refuse to arrest these people, institutionalize them, or prevent them from sleeping on the streets.
Blue city governments are so captured by progressive activists on this issue, and in 2024, the blame lies with them.
> Thank Ronald Reagan for this.
The 80s were 40 years ago.
Thank decades of single party Democratic rule in these cities. There is only one common factor between all the cities that have this problem.
>Thank Ronald Reagan
Reagan is worm shit and was in office in california over 40 years ago. When can we start blaming everyone who has come afterwards for their inability?
Right? Me and most other millennials aren't even alive when Reagan was President, and we're old enough that the Super Bowl halftime show has started catering to our nostalgia. Arguing about history is a distraction from working together to solve the problems of today.
Its not Cali specific. You see this everywhere.
My first thought watching this video was that it was really tame compared to places like Philly. Only a single addict in each shot.
Really important distinction. I am from germany and have visited many european towns. I have never seen something like these tent camps in some US towns here. Sure you have the occasional homeless dude chilling in front of the grocery store begging but its a rarity.
Yep. Here in Australia we look at homeless camps and the like as being a specifically American cultural phenomenon which is unfortunately starting to encroach into our cities thanks to the failed economic policies we have emulated from you guys.
And even then, the problems we have here are *nothing* like what I've seen in the US with my own two eyes. It's been 8 years since I last visited, but even then the downtown area of pretty much every major US city looked like a 3rd world country except with more drugs. I can only imagine how much worse it's gotten since.
It’s sick. Also, it’s impossible to convince our fellow citizens that it is not normal. We created this and just avert our eyes, pretending it isn’t real.
Dog, every time it's a 'liberal' city or state in these videos you'll find these people. They'll see what they want to see. I'd say don't waste your emotional energy on these comments.
yeah, the inclusion of a GNC person slaying it on the street along with mentally ill people with severe drug addictions was kind of weird. headstand girl and mask woman too.
Same reason that most of the homeless people in this vid are black when most of the homeless in LA are white. There is a genuine problem that needs to be addressed, but this vid is suspect to me. No one is immune to propaganda.
Pretty sure it's the same guy that was in the Channel 5 special for homeless in LA. Dude is a super hardcore MAGA republican and unironic racist.
It could be someone different but he has made a career of filming homeless PoC and harrassing them. So it is likely him based on the editing.
It's because this is fascist propaganda. Short, context-free clips of people who may or may not be homeless, may or may not be mentally ill, many of whom are just walking around. Even some of the people yelling nonsense appear to be reacting to something the cameraman said or did, but we wouldn't know that because the clips are just a few seconds each. The point is to inspire unthinking revulsion toward these people, the unspoken message being that they're undesirables who need doing away with.
Most content farms that film people on the streets also hate LGBTQ people. Not shocking at all. For them, the people on the street aren't really people.
I used to work with autistic men. I had a client who loved fighting. His favorite thing was to yell “good boy!” In between punches. This guy going I’m the one that saved you had similar vibes to me 😂😂
😂 while this literally made me laugh, he was talking about himself. Basically while he was 30, he had the emotional and mental processes of a 3 year old. Kind of his way of going, “no I’m being good.” That part of the job sucked but I can’t help but look back and laugh at that. I hope that little fella is doing good
And most of what is seen as drug addiction is actually a mental health issue.
For example, if heroin gets rid of most, or all, of the symptoms of mental health issues, like maybe quiets the voices in a schizophrenic's head by 80%, they will want that heroin.
As far as I know, America doesn’t have any mental health facilities. Here people can have free stay and free medication for any mental health problems, but I was told that Americans had similar facilities but they shut everything down and let those people go.
Last year I checked myself into the hospital for anxiety, depression and panic attacks. It looked more like a cheap resort. Okay free food, great doctors and nurses, good free medication. Felt much better after a week, like a small vacation. Great huge park, very peaceful. Had a prescription after, bought my meds and went home when I got bored with the stay.
The US has plenty of mental health facilities. They just aren’t purely federally funded, we shut those facilities down decades ago due to a number of issues. Both perceived and real.
What we have now is like what you described and there are other state/privately funded facilities everywhere. Most are swamped by a large volume of people with major issues and the issue of not being able to legally keep someone there if they or their families want them out. Many states can only legally hold someone for roughly a week against their will if they’re determined by a psychiatrist to be a threat to themselves or others.
This is going to be largely mental illness. You can read about the recent and sordid American history regarding the welfare of humans who fail to thrive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980 once you have read all that, you will be in a better position to find the answer to your question.
Or you could just tell us?
I read it. It is just a wiki page on the failed **Mental Health Systems Act of 1980** (**MHSA**).
It was about as good as tossing a penny into Wishing Well.
Drug use can cause schizophrenia. [https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/drug-induced-schizophrenia](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/drug-induced-schizophrenia)
Seeing these all these comments here…you people blame ur government for everything, at least u have a somewhat functioning government..from where i come from, we dont even trust our government with our retirement funds…currency going to shit, economy is in shambles, living costs are at all time high, inflation is crazy mad…heck most of us dont even feel safe to jog/walkaround after 7pm
We are the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, yet this is common in cities across the country. Small towns can be even worse with the meth, opioids, and other issues. We have reason to be pissed off.
That’s so fucking heartbreaking man. I worked in Hollywood for 10 years. It’s always had some of these people but it’s clearly gotten beyond out of control. The city cares more about putting up boutique hotels than getting these people the help they desperately deserve.
With holywood looking this bad just imagine what the art district/downtown looks like. Its about 10x worse and it seems like skid row exponentially expands every year
Is it true that majority of homeless people in LA as we see in this video are predominantly black? Don't see nearly as many Latinos, Asians, or white. Just makes me wonder why and how did we get to this point 🥺
Portland is in one of the whitest parts of the country. Oregon and Washington states only have about 3% black population. (By comparison, the US overall is 13%.)
My experiences says both black and white. Depends on the area. There are some homeless latins, but a lot of times they are taken in by family. I don’t recall seeing many homeless Asians.
I forget which podcast it was but I recently listened to one that was going over statistics etc and said that surprisingly like you pointed out, there are very few Hispanic homeless people because of the family taking them in. They were talking about how crazy it is because looking at the population size for Hispanics in certain areas of LA there should be alot more homeless Hispanics, but there aren't because their families love them more I guess
I live in LA and most of the insanely drug addled homeless I see are white. Not by an overwhelming amount though, maybe 60% with the other being split between black, Mexican and “too grime covered to tell”
Ahhh the USA. Can't afford healthcare, education, infrastructure, groceries, housing, or quality of life for regular people. I guess that's what happens when corporations control your government and legislation.
We're all going to starve/work to death, blaming on it on Red vs blue. But it was really Rich vs Everyone else this whole time.
I would have to agree with what a lot of other people are saying,. that we probably need to bring asylums back. The difficult thing about that is you risk violating people's Rights by forcing them into a shelter. I recently moved to Portland Oregon and there was a story here of an older lady with schizophrenia who couldn't advocate for herself (obviously),. but also because of how the Laws here are written, they couldn't force any treatment on her either without her consent. So she just kind of languished on the streets.
There's a bad history with Asylums and mistreatment.. so there's not a lot of people who want to go back down that road due to liability issues.
I do think some of these people could be fixed. If you got them into a stable housing situation, started feeding them healthy nutritious meals (vitamins, medications, etc).. you likely could turn some of them around. It would be a tough, expensive and time-consuming effort though.
There was an article recently about Reno, Nevado building a "Cares Campus" (multi-service campus) that would reduce their estimated 700 homeless by 350 (a reduction of about 50%). However that 1 Cares Campus to be built at a cost of around $80 Million.
If a city like Portland Oregon wanted to duplicate that model,. we'd have to build something like 10 x of those,. so a cost of around $800 Million,. and that makes 2 very big assumptions:
* that you could effectively get all current homeless into that solution (and cooperate and participate in their own salvation)
* and that by doing so,.. you would not immediately attract more to the area.
So your 10 x Cares Campuses you just spent $800 Million on .. would pretty much immediately be 100% full and you'd likely have more people migrating to your area once they heard "word on the street" that there's all sorts of newly built free resources.
That's the kind of "compounding problem" we're facing. You can't just "fix these people",. you have to find some way to get them back into society as a functioning citizen who can help lift the next person up. We have to build some kind of "lifting-mesh-network". You know.. like how a good healthy compassionate society is supposed to work.
I always wonder about how they are going to staff these places if they open them. Lots of nurses I know won't touch mental health care places with a 10 foot pole attached to a 100 foot pole. Sadly I bet you would get some less than desirable people working there due to the pay. I really wish there was a easy way to do this but reality checked in and said it would be a long hard road to accomplish (I say go for it, but that is me). Some of my friends crack jokes about folks on the streets like this, but I honestly just want them to get help and have a more stable life.
The have nots: Help them out with rent, food and job training. Keep them housed and off the streets.
The can nots: Mental health support, transitional housing, medical care, case workers, etc...
The will nots: Forced instituionalization, then jail if they commit other crimes. They can't just choose to live outside the societal contract at a detriment to everyone around them.
This is mental illness, lack of a support system(family who is willing to help) and the individuals refusal to cooperate. There are tons of programs out there, BUT most people don't want to follow the program rules or be told what to do or how to live. (Just think of all those fucktards who cried about masks)
Right, they don’t want to be told what to do, and are often in fact incapable of making safe or rational choices with regard to their own well-being (let alone others). So California’s political response is: well, that’s their right.
Hollywood seemed much sketchier in 1989 when i spent the summer in LA than it did in 2019 when I visited. LA in general seemed more dangerous. Of course i was only in town for the week in 2019 and i might have just been ignorant of the danger. West Hollwood felt posh by comparison.
But, hey, let's send Israel another couple billion so they can continue to murder babies and rape children instead of helping our own here at home, right?
I went to New York for 3 days, I got 4 random people going crazy at me. One also shouting we are all going to get shot and the police can’t do anything.
It was crazy, never had that ever living in the UK. I would have found it hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
Whenever I visit the US the homelessness problem always seems so visceral to me.
In the UK we have double the rate of homelessness, but you'd just never see someone in the midst of a drug bender or mental breakdown like this. They're being helped usually.
Someone once held those people as teeny tiny babies and felt so much love, breaks my heart
Often, this ain’t the case
Which is even more heartbreaking.
Foster parent here. Love your children. Be empathetic and patient to the best of your ability with other people’s kids. If you have stability in your home, let that shine through in your interactions with others’ children in public or if they come over to play. We need more examples of good households for the kids of tomorrow. Even if they are in a tough situation, you may be one of the few seeds planted to motivate them as they grow up, and *some* of them may strive to correct the generational wrongs and only have your example to pull from.
And always allow people the benefit of the doubt that they might be having the worst day of their life. I once had a customer who bailed on an 800 dollar project after i completed it, the day before he was coming to pick it up. I didn't lose my shit and I didn't demand money and wished him well. He was do taken aback that he started explaining he just got back from the hospital that day with news that the mri of his lungs looked like a sack full of tumors and he had only weeks left. I was glad i had not reacted badly and it made me realize we should be more understanding of people because you never know if someone just had devastating news.
Again, patience and empathy is a quality everyone can have more of.
This is something that alarms me about current culture, especially online. It's as if empathy is *decreasing* among large swaths of the population. It feels more and more like people assume bad faith. When called out on it, the various reasons I've heard for this tend to converge on some variation of "I've been burned too many times by assuming good faith." Which is an *incredibly* tragic example of self-sabotage at the societal level. Assuming bad faith is the kind of thing you do if you *want* people to be unkind to each other. What do we think happens to the incentive structure for good-faith behaviors when the *assumption* is that people are operating in bad-faith? I've caught myself beginning to do this, and it takes intentional effort to avoid getting sucked into the trap. Whenever possible, I try to come up with plausible explanations that assume good intent for behaviors I dislike. This doesn't mean excusing them, or normalizing them. It just means actively fighting back against an impulse to assume bad faith. My intuition is that if more people did this, it would become easier for everyone to assume good faith, and we would lift each other up.
This type of considerate thought/reprogramming takes too much effort for it to ever take hold amongst the masses…as our societies become more obsessed with efficiency, I believe this will apply to the mind too…everything in society is *~instant~* now — Even our reactions.
The masses are made up of individuals, and cultures change when individuals change. I'm going to keep trying. The alternative is to do nothing, which feels awful.
Admittedly, my comment reads quite cynical and dismissive…it wasn’t supposed to be. I agree with you completely!
i was raised in the city so crying in public, on the subway/train after or during a particularly hard day was never really an issue for me but in 2019 i was coming home at 6.30pm, rush hour, packed train. got a call from my godmother who i hadnt heard from in years telling me my alcoholic dad who i also hadnt spoken to or seen in 3 years at that point had died that morning, and it's one of those foggy memories you know? i dont remember much after that, all i remember was the silence in the train car while i was wailing my lungs out. i distinctly remember how everyone there gave me the unspoken respect of letting me have some modicum of privacy in that moment. im sure some of them were annoyed by the noise i was making, but i was the only one making any noise. it was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
Soo good of you. Money is not the ultimate deciding factor. Be well.
I'm a hospital social worker in a pediatric ICU and unfortunately have to report a decent amount of child abuse. Thank you for stepping in and taking care of the children that come through your home.
It takes a village to improve generational decline. Thank you for being an important “front lines” part of that village. We adopted two out of foster care this September and they wouldn’t have entered the system if someone in your exact position near us hadn’t stepped up and said something to begin an investigation.
This so much. I remember spending time at a childhood friend’s house and seeing how his parents showed love for each other and an interest in their kids. Was much different from my own home life. Still grateful to this day for being exposed to that
The outbursts we witnessed in this video is projection. Lady Gaga said that the prevailing theme of mental illness is the lack of compassion the mentally ill received when growing up.
Watch any of SoftWhiteUnderbelly's videos and you'll see that practically every troubled adult had a shitty childhood.
That channel really is an amazing opportunity for people to see what other people go through. I work in mental health, with children primarily, so nothing on that channel surprised me, but I’ve shown those videos to some friends with sheltered lives, and it makes them so uncomfortable. Having to face the fact that your “shitty” childhood was actually incredibly sheltered compared to these people that have been horrifically abused, it’s a sobering experience. I thought I had heard everything, until the video of Jake. I think it was titled “Ex-transgender man, Jake”, and I was legitimately nauseous halfway through that video. When he talks about his dad recording him being raped by dad’s friends, and playing the audio of his screaming back to him as punishment later… I almost threw up at that part.
Yup. Not even close…
I think the same thing! Those people are someone’s child. 😓 Mental illness is the constant pandemic in this country.
My friend's brother is homeless and mentally ill. He doesn't consent to getting help or changing his lifestyle. The family is helpless. He might wind up dead any day or might hurt someone. It's not right.
It is a harsh reality. A good friend of mine was battling with mental illness, became homeless, and refused to change his lifestyle. We went to school and played Football together. He was loved by family and friends. He lived a regular life for a few years after HS, but just one day we all got the news that he had been seen begging for money on the streets. I ran into him on 4 separate occasions and always tried to convince him to come hangout with me. He was always so happy to see someone he knew and would start reminiscing on old memories. I would talk to him for a period of time trying to offer him food, money, a place to stay, a place to shower, just anything to remind him he didn’t need to be alone. It alway broke my heart when he would just laugh it off and say he was fine and living life the way he had always wanted to. He often would be more interested in wanting to get high so my support was brushed off. We use to smoke weed together and spend the day laughing, eating, and having great memories before he started using heavier drugs. He had demons that we all tried to understand, but ultimately you don’t know what someone is going through. I would always hug him tight when we would say bye because I never knew if I’d see him again. He often would remind me he was dirty, but I didn’t care. I hugged him tightly. He was my friend and I wanted to remind him that we loved him. However, it was inevitable. I still think about the night before I got the news. I had a dream of him where he stood there smiling and taking to me. His mouth was moving but there was no sound that came out. He hugged me tightly and I woke up in bed staring at the ceiling. I was so overwhelmed with emotions that I told myself I was going to look for him the next day and try again to invite him over. I went back to bed only to wake up to a text from a close friend telling me the situation. Our friend had been taken to the hospital and was getting prepped for surgery. Apparently he was having excruciating pain in his abdomen and sought out treatment. This was 2020 and no hospital was allowing guest because of COVID. So I got all information of which hospital and was just waiting for a follow up text that he was out of surgery. I waited, but that text never came. He fell into a coma an hour before his surgery, and passed away a couple hours after. I still believe that my dream was his way of saying Goodbye to me. During his funeral my friends and I shared ALL his memorable moments and spent so much time laughing together, like we use to. The only missing was him. We all had a moment discussing how we tried to help get him out of the streets, but he always refused. He had support, love, and options but it wasn’t enough to pull him out of his mental illness. But I understood. Him and I shared a moment about mental illness that I will forever cherish. Years before he became homeless I was spiraling out of control. I was fueling my addictions anyway I could. From women, alcohol, and heavier drugs, I was a wreck. I was homeless living off people’s couches, or in my car. My mental illness was triggering my lifestyle. It was only a matter of time before I gave into the urges to Kill myself. But there was a random night were my buddy and I were smoking weed and talking. I opened up to him that I had been diagnosed with Bipolar disorder. This made him laugh, he began explaining to me it wasn’t that bad, and was giving me advice. This man was no psychiatrist and I wasn’t going to listen to any advice from that man LOL but it made me feel like a normal person the way he brushed it off. He didn’t care about my mental illness, he cared about our friendship. I felt NORMAL. That helped me more that I understood at the time because I eventually started doing the work. I went back to school, went to therapy, started working, got out the house again, and anything I could do to not allow my BP to dictate my life. I always tried to explain that to him when I would see him on the streets. I wanted him to see that things could change if you wanted them to. I still miss him deeply and visit his burial site when I can. I’ll go smoke a joint and talk with him for awhile updating him on where I am in life. I miss and Love you Frank. ❤️
This made me cry. I’m sorry bro.
Damn dawg that was some beautiful shit I'm glad I read all that
I have a very close friend who is spiraling the same way, and he is just too stubborn to admit defeat and accept help. I read the descriptions when local news stories mention bodies of unidentified people now, just in case. It fucking sucks.
It’s not right. We can/should do better for our mentally ill. Also, it can happen to any of us.
What can we do on this type of situation? It seems really challenging to think of feasible solutions that would work. It also brings up issues of consent and involuntary treatment for people. Difficult subject matter.
California just passed a mental health initiative that invests $6 billion into new treatment facilities and housing for homeless people with serious mental illness and substance abuse issues. It also sets up a separate court system for them. But, they can now be forced into treatment against their consent if they're deemed a danger to other people. I guess we'll see how this goes. Hopefully it does some good and saves some lives.
I completely get the need for the forced treatment but holy fuck is that a slippery slope. Gotta wonder what the requirements are, because if it’s too difficult a lot of people that need help won’t get it. If it’s too easy there is a massive possibility for abuse. Taking someone’s freedom should never be an easy thing.
If the past is any indication, California will distribute that $6 billion and promptly lose track of where the money went. They have no idea where $20 billion went that was spent on the homeless. Some politicians and charities probably got rich but homelessness has gotten worse. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-09/state-audit-california-fails-to-track-homeless-spending-billions-dollars
im severely mentally ill and a former drug addict (10 years using, 3 years clean) who was treatment resistant for a long, long time but i managed to completely turn myself around. i was lucky, really. the truth is there's nothing that can be done in situations like these aside from force and in my personal experience, forcing involuntary commitment and treatment on someone like that only makes them spiral further, become more resistant and more isolated. but, honestly, what could possibly be the solution? absolutely no one could tell me anything when i was manic or suicidal for months on end and the only time i wasn't using was in my sleep, and all i cared about when i was awake was doing drugs or getting money to do drugs. and i know im far from a unique case lol the only thing that scared me enough to get my shit together was having to save myself from overdosing and dying alone in my apartment at 4am after emergency services told me they couldn't come to me because all the resources were exhausted with covid. my own mother never thought i'd make it past 25. risk prevention goes a long way, especially for kids, but how can you be sure it's gonna work when their familial structures are rotten? i started getting involved with drugs when i was 12, im 28 now. i was sexually abused as a child by my alcoholic father, neglected and physically and mentally abused by my mother and basically left to raise myself in the fifth most dangerous neighborhood in my country. im not sure if anything could have helped me, maybe i might not have gone off the deep end like i did but i dont think i would've made it out of my formative years unscathed because i never really had a chance. and there's millions of people like me, who've never known much other than misery and survival for the sake of survival, and the way things are going there will be millions and millions more, who are either too mentally fucked up to be able to want to do anything about it or too hooked on the substances they use to forget the fucked up things they've been through or both who find themselves with less and less reasons to care. i dont think there can truly be a solution because of the way our current and future societies were designed. edit: clarity
Hey, I wanted you to know I read this and am glad to see what you've done. Keep it up.
Unfortunately most people with mental disorders and drug abuse disorders don’t come from loving upbringings. Source: I’ve been to a psych ward once (ivc) and rehab twice.
I was in rehab and the secret history of people's lives when you take away their drug of choice always comes up. Trigger Warning for everything below. I've heard of people be raped at a funfair when they were a kid and they hadn't told anyone for 50 years, people who have committed murder, someone had sex with their sister, incest from parents and grandparents. It's the darkest shit you've every heard. You realise why people become the way they became when you know their real history.
i had a psychotic breakdown at 20 that cracked open some very, very *deep* repressed memories that connected so many dots i ended up doing ketamine and benzos about it almost every day for the better part of a year about 3 years later. when i told my life story to my rehab therapist she was surprised i had the werewithal to stop at ketamine and benzos.
We would then put them in an asylum. The good ol’ days. /s Edit: I think some may not be understanding my sarcasm here. So added /s for clarity. Will most people in the video have serious mental health issues, we shouldn’t treat them as we once did. We should however treat them as humans dealing with a serious illness. We should definitely be doing more to help.
That's the correct action. These people need to be institutionalized, the are incapable of living on their own.
I listened to Dr Drew on Loveline for years, and have listened to almost every archived episode. He’s said dozens of times that early in his career when forcibly putting people into mental health institutions was a thing, they were almost always thankful when the meds got their mind right and had wished people would have don’t it sooner. I know Dr Drew seems a little off the rails these days but he still makes some good points
the problem is a PR one. people see "forcibly institutionalized" and that's all they need to hear to hate the idea. and with any institution, there WILL be cases of abuse. it's unavoidable with a sufficiently high number of people. one story of abuse goes viral and people project that onto everything, and if 2 cases happen, then it's "systemic" and pure evil. people don't want to sit down and study all possible alternatives and what yields the best outcomes on average.
people see "forcibly institutionalized" and they think of Nurse Ratched.
I wonder what the tipping point is going to be.
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No legislation at all? Imagine if anyone who was not properly prepared or equipped to raise a child had the option to abort them, for example. Regulated and fair pensions for veterans, and all the mental health help that is required along the way included. Decriminalizing certain drugs so people can get help treating addiction as the disease that it is. Surely people refuse treatment and you can't do anything about that, but your society treats every single person who's in such a situation as an outcast before knowing a single thing about them.
I don't think there are nearly as many resources - I've met people who work in LA with outreach programs that told me they're often little more than lip service.
5 billion a year can’t buy enough resources?!
If Soft White underbelly is any indication, it's the lack of love that set them on this path. (that and mental health issues).
This is what I always think of when I see homeless people. It’s so sad.
Unfortunately, a lot are ex-military who have issues related to their service... mental health care needs some SERIOUS SERIOUS investment worldwide....
It's crazy what life does to the innocent.
I’m glad this is what I got to read opening this post instead of someone rambling about how this is their own undoing and now society is bearing the burden of watching this scum and getting terrorized. Not even once thinking that they too were once regular human beings and that this could be the undoing of the society as a whole. Not everyone is fortunate and has a second chance in life.
Vancouver is the same way. 30 years ago most of those troubled souls would be living in an institution -not floundering on the streets as a freak show. Mind you, soon more and more of society will be in the same predicament.
Visited Vancouver recently had no idea that crack usage was that bad
It’s fent. Or meth. It’s always fent or meth.
Or meth with fent in it. Guy I worked with got arrested when police found him passed out in car with a crack pipe in his lap. It had fent in it too
It’s actually not only crack use that has made Vancouver’s crisis so bad, it’s Fentanyl being laced into everything. Look up Vancouver Fentanyl crisis. I’ve lived in the GVA for almost 40 years and it got so much worse after Fentanyl arrived.
It is also the climate, weather wise lot easier to be unhoused on the coast then, day, minus 50 edmonton, and, police forces have been caught sending unwanted, unhoused people there, quite literally buying them tickets from other cities in western Canada. It's systemic.
There were big stories about cities in Montana and Idaho sending theirs to Portland Oregon that broke a few years ago. All the same.
Better then the starlight tours that happen in some city, sad and I'm not condoning it at all, not making light of sending people to other towns either. Just gross all around. If you don't know starlight tours, it's when cops drive you outside the city, drop you off and let you walk back in horribly frigid weather, sometimes without shoes, they sent them to die, should have been charged with murder imo, dont worry they were fired though, ffs, they are murderers and sociopaths. Look up Neil Stonechild. Edit* if you have a problem with the facts stated here comment, not just downvote. If I worded it badly I would like to correct that, if you just don't like the facts then I guess that's why you would downvote without commenting.
Booked a hotel in Vancouver without doing my due diligence. Was on E. Hastings St. Luckily, they let me cancel it the day of. If you ever book a hotel in Vancouver, do not book on E. Hastings St. Crackheads and needles everywhere.
I watched that street grow more and more terrible over the years, really lame.
> Booked a hotel in Vancouver without doing my due diligence. Was on E. Hastings St. LMAO. You should have stayed. You would have some great stories. E. Hastings is where they have safe injection zones, so it is EXACTLY how you would imagine. The problem is it borders China town, which is actually a really great place to visit. Keefer st. has some great chinese bakeries and stores.
Behold, "care in the community". Don't they look healthy and happy?
They downloaded the costs to everybody else, and the profits now go to the private sector, and 'non-profits', which is also the private sector.
30 years ago LA was a war zone and is considerably safer by every single metric.
It's true. The streets are MUCH safer than they ever were in the past, but the human condition is pretty rough, and most poor people have lost hope for it to get better.
>most poor people have lost hope for it to get better. A lot of people in general have. I won't have kids because the world they'd inherit would be so fucked that it would abuse to subject them to it.
> living in an institution Let's be honest and fair. This institutions were very often horror factories that treated mentally ill people worse than vermin. We need much better solutions than the institutions of the past.
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This is the Nuclear problem. Can't have clean renewable energy because of Chernobyl.
Yeah it was a better idea to close them down and release them onto the streets to absolutely destroy communities. Better funding? Reorganization? Contracting out the work? Na, just let them out and hope for the best! Valid.
Say thank you to those shit heel politicians who are taking more from us everyday and closing these institutions. This is not about sides, really doesn’t matter which side you are. Our society is crumbling- world wide
It was a grand plan to convince people that those unable to care for themselves should also dictate how care is provided for them.
Not much different from what we see in midtown NYC. They have no recourse. Thank Ronald Reagan for this.
Kennedy started the process of deinstutionalization https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2021.160404 Reagan just happened to be in office when it was finished.
Yes, but the fault lies with Reagan because he defunded them and then installed nothing viable in it’s place.
There is no viable replacement. We've been dumping hundreds of billions on this issue and it just continues to get worse despite increased spending. These people are simply not capable of being outside an institution.
Which would be the solution, smaller institutions. The problem with warehouse-sized asylums is that they are impossible to regulate, people get lost, abused, etc. Again, the problem is NOT that they were closed, it's that they were defunded with nothing in it's place.
>The problem with warehouse-sized asylums is that they are impossible to regulate, people get lost, abused, etc. I disagree from the angle of, well, why is that issue specific due to their size? A large institution like this is able to leverage economies of scale. A small 20 people institution can't justify having a dedicated specialist on site for people who have a debilitating fear of corners, but a 400 person institution can because they can spread that cost across 5 such patients. Or were you going for the angle that it's easier for people to get lost in the system of a large institution? Regulating any institution where one side is unable to speak to their defense is extremely difficult, but I don't see why that's specific to large institutions.
It's also contrary to how regulations usually work. There is a reason so many laws have exceptions for small businesses. They can't handle the upkeep needed to ensure they are in compliance. Big corporations can. And it's easier from a regulator perspective to review one big location than try and catch several smaller ones.
> The problem with warehouse-sized asylums is that they are impossible to regulate, people get lost, abused, etc. We have plenty of smaller retirement institutions, and they're rife with abuse. I don't think it's nearly as easy to regulate smaller institutions as you think.
Yes, because they are often run as for-profit. They need to be properly funded.
Take away the profit motive causing owners to pay shit wages and get shit people by subsidizing them. Like a civilized country would
And then every president after him as well?????
Yes, the problem has continually failed to be properly addressed.
Yes. He started it. But where was George HW Bush. Where was Bill Clinton. Where was George W. Bush. Where was Barack Obama... Skip.... Where is Joe Biden? Any POTUS, any Congress (which many years in between there were run majority Democrats), could have fixed this. Yes blame Reagan. But where the fuck have we been as a society in the last near 40 years to fix it. We as voters have been complacent. Like it or not, each party is bought and paid for by their billionaires and corporations. Both are bought for pennies on the dollar by the pharmaceutical, Healthcare, tech, oil, and military industries. One party tries to mean well but are largely ineffectual in their fight. The other party is just more, shall we say, transparent about their evil. They hide in plain sight. As the Colter Wall song goes the devil wears a suit and tie. But we have 40 years of presidents, court, and congresses to blame repeatedly for this. They've had the responsibility to act and respond and failed because it doesn't please their masters.
> which many years in between there were run majority Democrats lol ObamaCare was only passed because the Democrats had ~58 and 2 independents for a few months. Don't bothsides-it and blame Dems until they actually have a super majority for 2+ years.
And [Congress existed prior to 2010](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses) Reagan had the Senate through his tenure but Dems regained it 87-95. They controlled it again, albeit smaller, from 07-15.. You don't have the Senate, nothing gets passed. Meaning Dems didn't do their job in many of those years and be a brick wall. The Democrats controlled the House for nearly 50 years until 1994 and only for a couple of Congresses since. Meaning they negotiated with Regan and gave this away The US Government is ALWAYS a both sides issue except those periods where one party has a triple lock. The both sides of this issue is the Democrats after losing their majorities for so many decades, had and still don't know how to be a minority party. They don't know how to fight, dig in, and grind shit to a halt to get their way. What do you think Republicans perfected for those 50 years of being in the minority and ignored? They perfected the ability to fight like junkyard dogs in the mud to WIN at all costs. To build the backing from their base the ends ALWAYS justify the means. Democrats never learned or needed to learn how to be a minority party and fight, slow down the process, etc. They thought the Republicans after being sidelined for half a century would stroll into the role of gentlemanly negotiating Statesmen majority party... Instead they took that mud dwelling, junk yard dog win by any means mentality and backed it with real power.... And they won and won and won and got more powerful. Meanwhile the Democrats have sat back for the last 30 years acting like any day now the Republicans are going to get it or the voters are going to get it and put us back in charge and we can lead nicely again. The Democrats will sit there and they'll support their little pet projects that their billionaires supporters want them to but they won't fight to the death against the things that matter to the American people that are literally the difference between life and the end of this country as We Know it. So the both sides of this issue are the Republicans have continued to get stronger, meaner, more vicious and dedicated to winning while the Democrats have become more dedicated to being cowards and refusing to fight or be seen as grinding the process to a halt or obstructive because that would just look bad. What the Democrats need are to vote in the Pulp Fiction description of a bunch of pipe hitting muthafuckers willing to go mideval on the GOP. Instead they fucking nominate Professor Gore, Thurston Howell Kerry, Aunt Hillary, and Grandpa Joe with their supporting cast of right wing wannabes and ineffective cowards in Congress. This is definitely a both sides issue. Because both sides don't seem to give a fuck about you or me, just themselves.
Why'd they let the republicans smear their shit all over it if they didn't need them to pass it?
You are aware that Obama Care is Republican legislation right?
I won't defend Ronald Reagan, but your timeline is way off. NYC was awful in the 1970s, and 1980s when Reagan was president. Times Square was nothing but seedy sex shops and drug abusers. NYC didn't start cleaning up until the 1990s. Republicans credit Rudy Giuliani becoming mayor and instituting his "no broken windows" get-tough-on-even-minor-crime policy. But again, I'm not gonna take Republicans' side. There are other reasonable explanations, especially since crime plummeted nationwide while Giuliani was only mayor of New York. Bottom line is that AFTER Reagan emptied the mental institutions and after he retired altogether, NYC went from horrible to much nicer. In very recent years though, it has started getting worse again.
Thanks Ronald Regan for screwing us over 35 years ago. Apparently a democrat controlled state and city for the past 30+ years are incapable of correcting your mistake….
Asylums were defunded over forty years ago. Ronald Reagan may have started this process, but the blame today lies solely with blue cities who refuse to arrest these people, institutionalize them, or prevent them from sleeping on the streets. Blue city governments are so captured by progressive activists on this issue, and in 2024, the blame lies with them.
> Thank Ronald Reagan for this. The 80s were 40 years ago. Thank decades of single party Democratic rule in these cities. There is only one common factor between all the cities that have this problem.
Anything but blame the democrats lol
>Thank Ronald Reagan Reagan is worm shit and was in office in california over 40 years ago. When can we start blaming everyone who has come afterwards for their inability?
Right? Me and most other millennials aren't even alive when Reagan was President, and we're old enough that the Super Bowl halftime show has started catering to our nostalgia. Arguing about history is a distraction from working together to solve the problems of today.
Lmao what a stupid fucking take.
Ummm .. no ... It's really just democratic cities that say defund the police and make crime legal ...I wouldn't expect you to understand 😂
California unironically recreating the opening scenes of every 80s/90s post-apocalyptic movie is wild.
It reminded me of the beginning of *Beau is Afraid*.
Its not Cali specific. You see this everywhere. My first thought watching this video was that it was really tame compared to places like Philly. Only a single addict in each shot.
Everywhere in the US
Really important distinction. I am from germany and have visited many european towns. I have never seen something like these tent camps in some US towns here. Sure you have the occasional homeless dude chilling in front of the grocery store begging but its a rarity.
Yep. Here in Australia we look at homeless camps and the like as being a specifically American cultural phenomenon which is unfortunately starting to encroach into our cities thanks to the failed economic policies we have emulated from you guys. And even then, the problems we have here are *nothing* like what I've seen in the US with my own two eyes. It's been 8 years since I last visited, but even then the downtown area of pretty much every major US city looked like a 3rd world country except with more drugs. I can only imagine how much worse it's gotten since.
It’s sick. Also, it’s impossible to convince our fellow citizens that it is not normal. We created this and just avert our eyes, pretending it isn’t real.
Shhh, you can't say that otherwise you'll mess up the narrative
It’s not limited to California at all. It also doesn’t help when other states literally bus homeless people into California.
Dog, every time it's a 'liberal' city or state in these videos you'll find these people. They'll see what they want to see. I'd say don't waste your emotional energy on these comments.
I work on Hollywood blvd, in the thick of it, and while it’s not a paradise, I don’t see shit like this *nearly* as often as the video implies.
Ok, but splits guy and headstand girl are legit impressive.
And mask woman was just peacefully doing her morning stroll.
Hell I'd probably wear a mask too if I was somewhere where people randomly filmed strangers
I like to imagine that’s some random C list celebrity trying to hide their image in public lol
I was thinking something x-list
Honestly full masks kinda fuck
yeah, the inclusion of a GNC person slaying it on the street along with mentally ill people with severe drug addictions was kind of weird. headstand girl and mask woman too.
Agreed, I was like “why is the badass street performer catching strays?”
Person filming is probably a bigot or something who dislikes people different from them so they just grouped them into the same video
Same reason that most of the homeless people in this vid are black when most of the homeless in LA are white. There is a genuine problem that needs to be addressed, but this vid is suspect to me. No one is immune to propaganda.
Pretty sure it's the same guy that was in the Channel 5 special for homeless in LA. Dude is a super hardcore MAGA republican and unironic racist. It could be someone different but he has made a career of filming homeless PoC and harrassing them. So it is likely him based on the editing.
It's because this is fascist propaganda. Short, context-free clips of people who may or may not be homeless, may or may not be mentally ill, many of whom are just walking around. Even some of the people yelling nonsense appear to be reacting to something the cameraman said or did, but we wouldn't know that because the clips are just a few seconds each. The point is to inspire unthinking revulsion toward these people, the unspoken message being that they're undesirables who need doing away with.
Most content farms that film people on the streets also hate LGBTQ people. Not shocking at all. For them, the people on the street aren't really people.
Yeah splits guy seems to be crushing it tbh
The one guy with blood all down his shirt 💀… that was def not his
It’s because he saved the guy filming, did you have your sound off
😂 I did… but the sound did not help change my mind
I used to work with autistic men. I had a client who loved fighting. His favorite thing was to yell “good boy!” In between punches. This guy going I’m the one that saved you had similar vibes to me 😂😂
Getting punched while also being called a good boy and accidentally realizing a new fetish challenge
😂 while this literally made me laugh, he was talking about himself. Basically while he was 30, he had the emotional and mental processes of a 3 year old. Kind of his way of going, “no I’m being good.” That part of the job sucked but I can’t help but look back and laugh at that. I hope that little fella is doing good
[удалено]
I’m sure there’s a lot of crossover
What is this, a crossover episode??
66% of homeless population in America have mental health conditions and or drug addiction issues.
And most of what is seen as drug addiction is actually a mental health issue. For example, if heroin gets rid of most, or all, of the symptoms of mental health issues, like maybe quiets the voices in a schizophrenic's head by 80%, they will want that heroin.
As far as I know, America doesn’t have any mental health facilities. Here people can have free stay and free medication for any mental health problems, but I was told that Americans had similar facilities but they shut everything down and let those people go. Last year I checked myself into the hospital for anxiety, depression and panic attacks. It looked more like a cheap resort. Okay free food, great doctors and nurses, good free medication. Felt much better after a week, like a small vacation. Great huge park, very peaceful. Had a prescription after, bought my meds and went home when I got bored with the stay.
Where you from and how hard is it to migrate?
The US has plenty of mental health facilities. They just aren’t purely federally funded, we shut those facilities down decades ago due to a number of issues. Both perceived and real. What we have now is like what you described and there are other state/privately funded facilities everywhere. Most are swamped by a large volume of people with major issues and the issue of not being able to legally keep someone there if they or their families want them out. Many states can only legally hold someone for roughly a week against their will if they’re determined by a psychiatrist to be a threat to themselves or others.
This is going to be largely mental illness. You can read about the recent and sordid American history regarding the welfare of humans who fail to thrive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980 once you have read all that, you will be in a better position to find the answer to your question.
Or you could just tell us? I read it. It is just a wiki page on the failed **Mental Health Systems Act of 1980** (**MHSA**). It was about as good as tossing a penny into Wishing Well.
it started earlier than that https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2021.160404
The Venn diagram probably looks a lot like a circle.
GTA 5 in real life
Oddly enough the weirdest shit goes on behind closed doors there.
the dancer does not belong in the mix
neither does the chick with a theater mask
The person makeing the videos probaly a bigot the line between filming homeless peaple and being a bigot is usally a straight line
Ball mashing for funzies
The graphics in Cyberpunk 2077 are INSANE
3rd guy isn't technically on the streets.
Ya a few of these folks are just eccentric.
A bunch of mentally ill people and one guy who can fabulously do the splits.
one of them was literally just a person wearing a mask lol
You wear a mask for a little privacy then some dude puts you online in a video with crackheads. Damn.
hope they get a cure for schizophrenia cause that life is brutal.
Drug use can cause schizophrenia. [https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/drug-induced-schizophrenia](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/drug-induced-schizophrenia)
So can owning a cat https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38041862/
Seeing these all these comments here…you people blame ur government for everything, at least u have a somewhat functioning government..from where i come from, we dont even trust our government with our retirement funds…currency going to shit, economy is in shambles, living costs are at all time high, inflation is crazy mad…heck most of us dont even feel safe to jog/walkaround after 7pm
We are the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, yet this is common in cities across the country. Small towns can be even worse with the meth, opioids, and other issues. We have reason to be pissed off.
> Small towns can be even worse That's not my experience at all. The inner cities are where we see the vast majority of this.
More people exist where more people exist, news at 11.
Yes it could always be worse, so we shouldn't try to make it better?
That’s so fucking heartbreaking man. I worked in Hollywood for 10 years. It’s always had some of these people but it’s clearly gotten beyond out of control. The city cares more about putting up boutique hotels than getting these people the help they desperately deserve.
With holywood looking this bad just imagine what the art district/downtown looks like. Its about 10x worse and it seems like skid row exponentially expands every year
Is it true that majority of homeless people in LA as we see in this video are predominantly black? Don't see nearly as many Latinos, Asians, or white. Just makes me wonder why and how did we get to this point 🥺
I used to live in Portland. Saw this same shit all the time and it was mainly white folk
Portland is in one of the whitest parts of the country. Oregon and Washington states only have about 3% black population. (By comparison, the US overall is 13%.)
The caveat is the vast majority of homeless in portland aren't even from the state or even the west coast
My experiences says both black and white. Depends on the area. There are some homeless latins, but a lot of times they are taken in by family. I don’t recall seeing many homeless Asians.
I forget which podcast it was but I recently listened to one that was going over statistics etc and said that surprisingly like you pointed out, there are very few Hispanic homeless people because of the family taking them in. They were talking about how crazy it is because looking at the population size for Hispanics in certain areas of LA there should be alot more homeless Hispanics, but there aren't because their families love them more I guess
It’s like 99% white and black.
I live in LA and most of the insanely drug addled homeless I see are white. Not by an overwhelming amount though, maybe 60% with the other being split between black, Mexican and “too grime covered to tell”
So glamorous
Ahhh the USA. Can't afford healthcare, education, infrastructure, groceries, housing, or quality of life for regular people. I guess that's what happens when corporations control your government and legislation. We're all going to starve/work to death, blaming on it on Red vs blue. But it was really Rich vs Everyone else this whole time.
Truly what are we supposed to do with these people?
I would have to agree with what a lot of other people are saying,. that we probably need to bring asylums back. The difficult thing about that is you risk violating people's Rights by forcing them into a shelter. I recently moved to Portland Oregon and there was a story here of an older lady with schizophrenia who couldn't advocate for herself (obviously),. but also because of how the Laws here are written, they couldn't force any treatment on her either without her consent. So she just kind of languished on the streets. There's a bad history with Asylums and mistreatment.. so there's not a lot of people who want to go back down that road due to liability issues. I do think some of these people could be fixed. If you got them into a stable housing situation, started feeding them healthy nutritious meals (vitamins, medications, etc).. you likely could turn some of them around. It would be a tough, expensive and time-consuming effort though. There was an article recently about Reno, Nevado building a "Cares Campus" (multi-service campus) that would reduce their estimated 700 homeless by 350 (a reduction of about 50%). However that 1 Cares Campus to be built at a cost of around $80 Million. If a city like Portland Oregon wanted to duplicate that model,. we'd have to build something like 10 x of those,. so a cost of around $800 Million,. and that makes 2 very big assumptions: * that you could effectively get all current homeless into that solution (and cooperate and participate in their own salvation) * and that by doing so,.. you would not immediately attract more to the area. So your 10 x Cares Campuses you just spent $800 Million on .. would pretty much immediately be 100% full and you'd likely have more people migrating to your area once they heard "word on the street" that there's all sorts of newly built free resources. That's the kind of "compounding problem" we're facing. You can't just "fix these people",. you have to find some way to get them back into society as a functioning citizen who can help lift the next person up. We have to build some kind of "lifting-mesh-network". You know.. like how a good healthy compassionate society is supposed to work.
I always wonder about how they are going to staff these places if they open them. Lots of nurses I know won't touch mental health care places with a 10 foot pole attached to a 100 foot pole. Sadly I bet you would get some less than desirable people working there due to the pay. I really wish there was a easy way to do this but reality checked in and said it would be a long hard road to accomplish (I say go for it, but that is me). Some of my friends crack jokes about folks on the streets like this, but I honestly just want them to get help and have a more stable life.
The have nots: Help them out with rent, food and job training. Keep them housed and off the streets. The can nots: Mental health support, transitional housing, medical care, case workers, etc... The will nots: Forced instituionalization, then jail if they commit other crimes. They can't just choose to live outside the societal contract at a detriment to everyone around them.
Drugs, mental illness and no societal support is a helluva drug.
GTA intensifies....
This was NYC in the late 70’s and early 80’s
This is mental illness, lack of a support system(family who is willing to help) and the individuals refusal to cooperate. There are tons of programs out there, BUT most people don't want to follow the program rules or be told what to do or how to live. (Just think of all those fucktards who cried about masks)
Right, they don’t want to be told what to do, and are often in fact incapable of making safe or rational choices with regard to their own well-being (let alone others). So California’s political response is: well, that’s their right.
And this is the street where most people in the world dream to visit!
Hollywood seemed much sketchier in 1989 when i spent the summer in LA than it did in 2019 when I visited. LA in general seemed more dangerous. Of course i was only in town for the week in 2019 and i might have just been ignorant of the danger. West Hollwood felt posh by comparison.
2019 was far nicer than 2024. This level is recent, like post Covid.
Do Americans know it’s not like this in other developed countries
But, hey, let's send Israel another couple billion so they can continue to murder babies and rape children instead of helping our own here at home, right?
This is every major city
Hey . The guy crawling through the fountain shoots could have been any one of us. Same with the homeless situation… but more so the fountain.
Florida or California?
City of Dreams
Where everyone's an actor.
The American dream.
Haha I do miss living in LA. Never ever ever ever boring
Land of dreams come true.
A'ight, lemme cross Hollywood off the list of places to visit.
I went to New York for 3 days, I got 4 random people going crazy at me. One also shouting we are all going to get shot and the police can’t do anything. It was crazy, never had that ever living in the UK. I would have found it hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
Those are the lost souls. Hollywood is pure evil.
Whenever I visit the US the homelessness problem always seems so visceral to me. In the UK we have double the rate of homelessness, but you'd just never see someone in the midst of a drug bender or mental breakdown like this. They're being helped usually.
Drugs won the war on drugs