Canada

It's really just institutionalization by another name. While homeless people are in involuntary care, the people who don't want them around will have their wish, and from their point of view, having the homeless cycle back into the system within a few months of release is a feature, not a bug. It doesn't actually do anything to curb substance abuse, but it isn't really meant to.

Used to be that mentally ill and addicted people could still afford cheap (flop) housing.

The problem of homelessness is caused by property owners, investors and government policy - not by its victims.

Involuntary addiction treatment can be helpful at times - sometimes required of physicians, and pilots with substance use problems with great success.

But punishing the poor is just a distraction from the fact that we have homelessness just so landlords can keep raising your rent.

Anyone with any experience with addiction understands that the desire to beat it has to come from within the addicted or it won't stick.

Another weak, sentiment-based opinion with no real positive ideas.

Take it from somebody that works in the system and has for many years... What we are missing are actual services.

Like 10 times more detox beds. Dedicated treatment centers staffed by psychologists and therapists. We need social housing.

Nothing is ever going to work with any form of forced healing, until the services are in place so that when a person voluntarily wants to obtain healing, it's actually available to them.

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.

Nobody thinks involuntary care will fix anything except having to see homeless people. The people advocating for involuntary care know what they're doing and they're despicable. If this doesn't work they'll just send them to jail.

They also know that involuntary care and jails are MORE expensive than housing. They don't care. Suffering is the point.

It seems nobody has a good solution, just disjointed efforts. The only hope I see for changing the creation of people that end up homeless Is early support for abused people, and mental health care for free, so that future generations have better chances of avoiding drugs as a coping mechanism for their demons.

To the articles: There seems to be a point where the drugs in society have become so addictive that it ~100% removes the persons ability to make healthy choices for themselves, and removes joy from life- other than the drug.

It seems to make logical sense to move the people suffering to involuntary care. We bring physically injured people to hospital and perform life saving surgeries on those that are too injured to refuse treatment choices.

As compassionate humans we take injured wild animals against their will and force them into treatment so they can live a proper life, so we try to do the same with our fellow humans.

Maybe its the wrong approach, but the other non barrier methods don't appear to be working.