Reply to Why no Involuntary Commitment in DC?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DC has involuntary commitment.  But a person has to meet the standard.  I will agree with you that mental health services are sorely lacking.  And, it is also tough because if a person is considered competent, they are in charge of their treatment and family gets no say.

Many people stop taking medications that would give them a better quality of life.  Some do for financial reasons (and this is not only a mental health issue).  Others stop because they feel better and don't understand that if they stop the medication they will decompensate.  Others stop because of the side effects.  And, some even stop because they like how they feel without the medication - like the manic phase of bipolar disorder if their manic is positive and energetic.  It's really complicated.[/quote]

I get that. However, [b]how is it that Britney Spears has conservatorship, but we can't as a society look out for other people unable to make sound decisions?[/b] The mental health / and or addiction fiasco in our countryleads to so many unintended consequences... If someone says  they want to remain in the streets during hypothermia conditions for example, why isn't that evidence they are not of sound mind and a ticket to the mental health treatment facility?[/quote]

This comparison is not helpful because the reason Britney Spears is in the situation that she's in is that she is a wealthy woman who had not exhausted her earning potential. Most people under conservatorship are not wealthy and being the conservator is not lucrative the way it is for the Spears family.

I used to work in community mental healthcare in DC, and I knew Angela. I am sad that she died but I am not at all surprised. If anything, I am surprised she survived as long as she did. She was extremely resistant to help of any kind. One time we tried to bring her water during a heatwave in the summer and she literally threw the bottle back at me.

Hospitalization is intended to stabilize people. It is not a destination so much as a transitional point between crisis and maintenance. There are a lot of people who would really benefit from halfway houses and group homes, and nowhere near enough of those types of facilities to accommodate everyone who would benefit from living in one. Additionally, opening that kind of facility is expensive and frequently opposed by the neighborhoods around the facility. It is also worth noting that among homeless folks and people at risk of homelessness, almost any option is better than going to a shelter. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of them legit and some much less so, but at the end of the day, shelters (in DC specifically and also other places I've lived and worked) are not viewed as safe options. In shelters, people's stuff gets stolen. They're assaulted by other shelter residents. Staff at shelters are not always kind and respectful, particularly if there is some kind of conflict between a resident and staff over a rule. Everyone I've spoken to who has spent time in DC shelters as a resident likens it to jail in terms of the restrictions. I don't disagree that it's a bad decision, but people are allowed to make all kinds of bad decisions without having their self-determination taken away from them. You guys might not think of things like psychiatric hospitals as "not like cages" but I promise you that the majority of the people who I had taken to psychiatric hospitals against their will very much thought of it as jail.

As for the idea of criminalizing homelessness, until society is also able to fully commit to preventing homelessness in the form of providing housing to people who can't provide it themselves, in a sustainable way, criminalizing homelessness is cruel. Until society (and a lot of people on this thread) is able to fully commit to the idea that homeless people are PEOPLE, not gross objects to be stashed in "day stations", there is not going to be any real progress in this area. The people y'all are talking about understand how they are perceived, and frankly, that alone dissuades people from wanting to "seek services."

When Britney Spears was put under conservatorship, I thought, "Wow, look how fast the system can move to protect a wealthy white woman and her wealthy white kids from the effects of mental illness." When she stayed under conservatorship for this long, I thought, "Those people would evaporate if it was no longer financially worth it for them." I saw an awful lot of Black families destroyed by the effects of mental illness and addiction. Kids who didn't have relatives riding in to the rescue because their relatives were not in a better position than their parents. The system is quick enough to say, "This parent is not fit" and take kids away, but as someone who has also worked in child welfare, so many of the things that people consider to be parenting problems are actually poverty problems. People living in generational poverty have a really hard time in DC even with all the services that are available. I worked with so many families who were in trouble with CPS for making the best of really bad choices - e.g., leave your 6yo to get to school on her own at 8am because you have to get on three buses to get to your job across town or else you'll lose your housing. In many of these situations, there are obvious solutions - e.g., provide entirely subsidized housing until families are able to meet situation-specific benchmarks related to savings, education, certifications, etc. - but there isn't the political will to institute those solutions, and there certainly isn't the social will to fund them.[/quote]

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