I'm not criticizing. I'm telling you as someone who has utilized social services since I was 17 that you have to investigate how money is spent by these types of programs. I never drank or did drugs, but I know how dysfunctional the mental health care system is and have spent many weeks adding up to months of my life in hospitals with people who are or were addicts. That's not even to mention again my years of homelessness.
These systems are failing in every state of the country: the mental health care system, the substance abuse recovery support system, the homeless support system. There wouldn't be so many unstable people, addicts or homeless if that weren't the case. This means a number of things.
Primarily it means that millions of dollars have been thrown away for decades by systemic dysfunction, waste of mismanagement and incompetence. The educational requirements for "psychiatric technicians," which are the staff who spend the most amount of time with patients in mental hospitals, are not only too low to be effective, they contribute to the deterioration of patients. Anyone who's been a mental patient for any significant amount of time can tell you that very little of therapeutic value takes place in mental hospitals and psychiatric units, and most people who have been patients have seen or been subjected to emotional or physical abuse in those facilities. The same is true of every facility which serves a stigmatized population of which the majority is impoverished.
These systems should be audited everywhere. Every dollar should be accounted for specifically. If an institutional recipient of funding says "The money went toward 'services,'" then the follow-up question should always be about a tangible result. "How many people moved from your facility into a safe, stable situation?" "How many of the same people who were here last year or 6 months ago are still here?" Facilities need to answer those questions with numbers that correspond to actual people, proof that how these facilities spend time and money is advancing the populations that they're supposed to be helping and not just supporting themselves.
I'm not even talking about corruption such as embezzlement, although I'm sure that's part of the problem. The worst problem is the apathy, the systemic laziness, of these institutions because they know that the rest of the world is used to blaming stigmatized populations for the failure to thrive.
Lack of training. Lack of empathy. Lack of discipline. Lack of a plan and sophisticated structure for helping people to build their lives. Many of the people who work in these facilities aren't doing much better than the people whom they're supposed to be helping. Those few who have some education or who really want to help are isolated.
Nobody should believe the Christmas card propaganda of social services. They need to be accountable for every dollar, every dime, and they need to be modernized.
I don't know when the people who manage homeless shelters are going to stop blaming only "lack of affordable housing" for chronic homelessness; probably never, because then the staff can sit there looking at their cell phones. Affordable housing programs are important; I am not homeless now because of Section 8, and having an apartment makes employment much less difficult. However, most of the people who leave homeless shelters already had the necessary independent living skills for their homelessness to be temporary. Nobody at any homeless shelter taught me to read or write, and even so, since 2011 I have spent a total of 6 years being homeless and each of my homeless stints during that time was for at least 2 years.
I don't know if anyone who hasn't been there can really understand. I cringe when I read articles that extensively quote service providers. Someone should be talking to the half-million homeless people who have been failed by these systems, to the people whose lives have been ruined by the mental health care system, and to the people who can't stay sober or who are sober because they figured it out after years of trial and error, years that they could have spent without so much pain.
