In Austin, Texas, in a 24-hour period in March less than a mile apart, a woman was punched several times and sexually assaulted, suffering a split lower jaw and bruises over her body; then a building was burned down, damaging adjacent buildings, causing about $1.5 million in damage. The common thread: Homeless men living on the street are the accused.
The homeless are on the streets because they don’t have homes — or so many of their so-called advocates claim. They see homelessness as a disease and prescribing housing as the first step to a cure — with housing seen as a right, like they believe health care should be.
But these advocates ignore the reasons at least three out of every four people experiencing homelessness end up sleeping on the sidewalks and asking passersby for cash: They suffer from untreated mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or both. Their chaotic, self-destructive behavior caused them to be unemployable, and they burned the bridges to their immediate family.
In 1955, before the advent of commercially available psychotropic drugs to treat mental illness, some 550,000 Americans were confined in mental asylums, with one of the common “cures” being a frontal lobotomy. Today, that number stands at about 40,000. But accounting for population growth, if the mental health system of 65 years ago were in use today, there’d be more than 1.1 million people institutionalized.
This 1.1 million figure is interesting for the following reason: Large numbers of people with mental illness are,
