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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   39485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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I think that Scott's latest article on how to defeat homelessness, was an okay steelman argument for the liberal policies with regards to the issue. At least, it's completely in line with the arguments I hear regarding my city's issues. There are a couple of things missing, though.

  1. People don't become psychotic out of nowhere. Years of unrestricted drug use does that to a person. And no, I don't want the continuation of the war on drugs, but I'm convinced that without somehow removing the drugs from the equation it's infinitely harder to approach a solution.
  2. Why do other countries don't have this problem? It's multifaceted, for sure - Finland and Japan use the "housing first" system Scott suggests and achieve great results, but I'll highlight one factor that I don't see anyone talking about in the first world: shame. In some societies like China or Turkey it's shameful to have a relative who is homeless. It's largely a cultural thing, but ultimately having relatives care about the homeless is a cheaper solution than building endless fields of Soviet blocks and intentionally creating ghettos that require policing. Is it possible to change a culture? How exactly is the western culture different? This is much harder to answer, but if we are talking about an ideal world with ideal outcomes, I'd prefer the community that experiences the issue to directly handle the issue.

People don't become psychotic out of nowhere.

Yes and no.

Drugs can make people become psychotic (acutely/temporarily), we think they can also make you stay psychotic permanently less commonly. We think they can set off psychotic disorders in people would not otherwise be likely to get that disorder and also trigger people earlier. People with a psychotic disorder (such as schizophrenia) that appears absent substance often end ups with addiction problems of all different kinds. Because we don't full understand the pathophysiology of these things and these populations are um....not reliable historians that does make it difficult to be sure about some of this stuff.

But yes psychosis does come out of nowhere....and at the same time is almost always associated with substance abuse (even if we are just talking about smoking).

Not all drugs have this impact on psychosis. It's generally pretty obvious (PCP!) but not always (Marijuana).

If you were a homeless schizophrenic with a disease addled brain and zero social support you'd probably abuse drugs also.

All that being said a whole bunch of things probably come together to make the U.S. so uniquely troublesome with this stuff. I think an underrated cause of this is probably the support for freedom in the U.S. (which I support) this means less ability for police to just toss and/or arrest vagrants, but also things like more limited ability to involuntarily commit and force medications on the severely ill. Since many of these diseases have a stepwise decline it's pretty easy to burn through your resources and supports and end up in a spiral leading to extremely poor functioning. Same person forced to take medication by their family maybe dodges the whole thing.

Yup, America's inherent libertarian values is something that trips up both the paternalistic right-wingers here and my fellow paternalistic left-wingers here.

The reason why Europe is OK with being harsher to homeless people is partly, there's a larger social safety net, but also, there's more people OK with basically a harsh rules-based order, as opposed to a bunch of descendants of people who didn't like that rules-based order, and risked their lives getting on a boat and being on the ocean for weeks, if not months.

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