For many homeless, the root cause is undiagnosed and/or untreated mental illness of some sort. That then spirals out of control until they end up on the street. Since we don’t give a shit about healthcare in this country, especially mental healthcare, that’s an inevitable result for many until we actually begin to fix the root causes.
The same is true of many drug users. And there is a large overlap on these populations for that reason. Homelessness is hell, addiction is hell, that fix lets them escape real life for a brief period of time. Their illegal actions like theft to fund that aren’t usually about wanting to do whatever it is so much as it’s needing to do it for the next fix, which is essentially a physical requirement to live at that point.
But again, we don’t give a shit about treatment and rehabilitation for drug dealers, throwing them in a box guaranteed to ruin any future prospects, while paying tens of thousands of dollars for prisons is apparently a better investment than attempting rehabilitation with those same funds.
When you then add that even “normal” members of society with full time jobs can’t afford a place to live, you get a cycle that feeds the homeless issue with new bodies daily as people can no longer keep their heads above the water and slip down.
For many homeless, the root cause is undiagnosed and/or untreated mental illness of some sort. That then spirals out of control until they end up on the street. Since we don’t give a shit about healthcare in this country, especially mental healthcare, that’s an inevitable result for many until we actually begin to fix the root causes.
The same is true of many drug users. And there is a large overlap on these populations for that reason. Homelessness is hell, addiction is hell, that fix lets them escape real life for a brief period of time. Their illegal actions like theft to fund that aren’t usually about wanting to do whatever it is so much as it’s needing to do it for the next fix, which is essentially a physical requirement to live at that point.
But again, we don’t give a shit about treatment and rehabilitation for drug dealers, throwing them in a box guaranteed to ruin any future prospects, while paying tens of thousands of dollars for prisons is apparently a better investment than attempting rehabilitation with those same funds.
When you then add that even “normal” members of society with full time jobs can’t afford a place to live, you get a cycle that feeds the homeless issue with new bodies daily as people can no longer keep their heads above the water and slip down.
That’s not true, the vast majority of homelessness is caused by being priced out of the housing market.