It seems so simple. So basic of an idea that you wonder why it has not been implemented yet.
It is involuntary care.
As communities across the province grapple with street disorder and a sense of insecurity, involuntary care is seen by many as a solution. Politicians of all stripes have offered it up to concerned residents and businesses as a path forward.
The problem is it is unlikely to be what people are expecting. The expectation is that it will be a panacea; the reality will be quite different.
You have to want to recover from addiction. If you have any kind of mental disorder, you have to want to be treated.
Both of these things are true but are unlikely to be solved with people living on the street or bunched up in dirty SROs in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver.
Riverside Hospital should be expanded to house multiple layers of homeless and mentally ill patients, each layer needs to be handling different issues.
Those who are down on their luck and managed to become homeless but dont have the means to get back to secure housing, they should be given training if needed and social workers to get them out of the provided housing and reintroduced into the work force.
A layer of the system should work on those with substance abuse issues, with therapy and withdrawal support then work them into the above layer.
Those with mental issues that can be treated with higher levels of therapy until moving them out into the housing and training layer.
Those with harder to treat mental issues should be held in stricter care that may have to be involuntary. This involuntary care should be under peer review regularly to make sure people aren’t being put in this care unnecessarily but there is a segment of people that cannot safely be out in the world through no fault of their own.
We as a society need to pay for these kinds of care because the cost of not doing it is too high, in lives lost and safety of the people living on the street.
It should also be said that companies and employers should be paying more to their employees and as taxes to keep people out of poverty as that is what can lead to more people on the streets.