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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Homelessness. Working in a field where the issue was adjacent to what we did, I learned a lot about them. The majority of them don't want "help" and "services" which means giving up their freedom and agency or means having to do something in return for shelter. They don't want job training or drug treatment. They don't want to live in a shelter. We should just give people housing and have some rules with it but there is a certain subset of people who are never going to function in society and there is no cure for it and they need to have a bathroom and bed and be able to sit inside during the day (shelters are only a place to sleep so they spend the day outdoors or prefer their tents). [b]We also need to bring back mental institutions and allow families the ability to commit family members.[/b] It is a broken, useless system for most people. For those who do want a leg up and the help provided, more power to them! But it's a minority who do. [/quote]

I agree about mental institutions but I can't imagine how they would be funded and where the work force would come from. [/quote]

Commitment is done by a court, not by family members. And it used to be far too easy. In college I worked part time in a group home that existed because of a federal lawsuit regarding institutions in my state. We had clients who never needed to be locked up somewhere at all. PEople with EPILEPSY used to be locked up for their entire lives. People with cerebral palsy. 
Because there was a federal lawsuit against the state, deinstitutionalization happened with funding, support, and resources. People would move to group homes, then often to independent living with or without high levels of supervision. Later in life, I was involved in disability advocacy. I met a woman whose first 50 years were spent in one of the institutions that was shuttered over time. She had an apartment and a fulltime job in food service at a state university. Before that, during the lawsuit, film footage taken surreptitiously by someone who had toured the facility showed things rooms with a dozen naked people in them at one time eating from trays on the floor. In the early 1970s. 
"Mental institutions" as in public psychiatric hospitals have never disappeared. There are 195 of them in the US. 
Permanent or very long-term residence in institutions inevitably leads to abuses of at least some of the people in them, whether in a nursing home, a correctional facility, or a state hospital. The more restricted the institution, the less likely people are to be protected from abuses. But more importantly, it does not equip them to live in society. 
People are still committed, but the problem is the lack of resources when they get out. I know someone who was committed 1-2 times a year for close to twenty years. She repeatedly lost housing as a result. At very long last, because the legislature FINALLY appropriate some (far from enough) money, she spent a year in a transitional group living residence with a dozen other people after a short time in an immediate crisis facility able to house 20 people for up to a month at a time. She got help getting a public housing apartment (a pretty hideous building/apt but livable) and for the past several years has had medications brought to her twice daily and has a caseworker to set up help shopping for groceries and personal items and get to appointments. She's had one short term hospitalization in the last 4 years. She's now checking into a program that will help find her work for 20 hrs/week at a non-profit, like stocking shelves at a thrift store.

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