Influx of mentally unstable, homeless people into the streets of Manhattan in the 80’s, led to the inception of New York city’s Project Help. The main aim of Project Help was to assist needy, homeless people, which was met with resistance. The ideology behind this project is not something new, as it saw a beginning with Hippocrates, Plato, and Galen who held the belief that mental disorders had natural causes. Such naturalistic approach was abandoned in the middle ages, substituting it for demonic possession and killing such people. However, towards the nineteenth century, “moral treatment” practice allowed patients to roam, work and live in a homelike atmosphere. In the twentieth century, with psychiatry embracing pharmacological treatments,
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While this is argued as false dichotomy, competence is not an either-or capacity, but a matter of degrees on a gradient. Any issue related to patients’ incompetence underlie any discussion of paternalism, which is treatment of adult patients as incompetent children who do not know their own best interests. Hence, while competence is presumed and does not need to be proved, incompetence has to be proved. So what was it that really mattered in Joyce Brown’s case – insanity or homelessness? Was she considered as an embarrassment by the rich neighborhood even if she had never been proven dangerous? The executive director of ACLU claimed that Project Help targeted areas seen by tourists and inhabited by the rich and Mayor Koch didn’t seem to worry about people with schizophrenia in bad neighborhoods. In the twenty-first century, lack of housing remains a problem for mentally ill homeless people, who are often plagued by drugs, dysfunctional families and poverty. The wandering mentally ill are now substituted with the new term “substance users who lack housing” by critics. They say that there is evidence that 85 percent of the panhandlers are alcoholics, substance users, or mentally ill. These new critics advocate mandatory treatment and police intervention to prevent
While this is argued as false dichotomy, competence is not an either-or capacity, but a matter of degrees on a gradient. Any issue related to patients’ incompetence underlie any discussion of paternalism, which is treatment of adult patients as incompetent children who do not know their own best interests. Hence, while competence is presumed and does not need to be proved, incompetence has to be proved. So what was it that really mattered in Joyce Brown’s case – insanity or homelessness? Was she considered as an embarrassment by the rich neighborhood even if she had never been proven dangerous? The executive director of ACLU claimed that Project Help targeted areas seen by tourists and inhabited by the rich and Mayor Koch didn’t seem to worry about people with schizophrenia in bad neighborhoods. In the twenty-first century, lack of housing remains a problem for mentally ill homeless people, who are often plagued by drugs, dysfunctional families and poverty. The wandering mentally ill are now substituted with the new term “substance users who lack housing” by critics. They say that there is evidence that 85 percent of the panhandlers are alcoholics, substance users, or mentally ill. These new critics advocate mandatory treatment and police intervention to prevent