Reply to What are you supposed to do when you encounter a mentally ill homeless person who seems to need help?

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[quote=Anonymous]OP you did the right thing.  Even most disability rights advocates would agree that someone in such an extreme situation (naked in the cold) should be brought to a hospital for treatment.  The hospital ER staff probsbly already knows her — most likely she would be treated and then released and perhaps can get to a more stable place or perhaps not.  The people saying you do nothing are heartless.  It may be that once stabilized this woman is able to have a period of relative normalcy.
Also, it’s entirely possible that this woman was naked and muddy  she had just been raped and assaulted and that she was screaming by the road because she needed help.

I have a harder time knowing what to do about the people I see in DC that are unconscious on a park bench or are visibly ill.  They may just be sleeping or the ill may be their baseline.  Or maybe they are in the middle of a heart attack or OD and need medical assistance—it’s impossible to know.  The upside is that in DC, there are usually at least a few homeless people that are in the same area, so I usually figure that the others there probably know that persons baseline better than I do and might know when it’s important to call for medical help.  I feel terrible just sort of stepping past them, but calling 911 on every unconscious person on the street doesn’t seem practical.[/quote]

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