American states wrestle with how to treat severe mental illness
WHEN AISLINN BIRD is not treating patients at her health clinic in downtown Oakland, she goes to see them where they live: in homeless encampments. Many of them sleep in tents under train tracks or highway overpasses. “If a big truck comes by or if the…train goes by, I have to stop the interview because then I can’t hear my patients,” she says. “It’s hard to create a therapeutic environment out here.” Dr Bird is part of a growing group of psychiatrists practising street medicine. Her teams frequent encampments around Oakland, offering homeless people everything from regular check-ups to treatment for mental illness and drug addiction.
More than a quarter of homeless Californians recently surveyed by the University of California in San Francisco said they had been hospitalised for mental illness. Two-thirds said they were currently struggling with a mental-health condition, ranging from anxiety to hallucinations. One third of respondents said they regularly use methamphetamine, which can cause psychosis akin to schizophrenia. This hazardous combination of drug use, mental illness and the physical hardship of sleeping rough has increased homeless deaths in big cities across the country. Some 2,200 homeless people died in LA County in 2021, an increase of 70% from 2019. The daily tragedies playing out on America’s streets are also changing the politics of homelessness in liberal states—and nowhere more than in California.
A slate of reforms signed into law last week in California is meant to tackle this problem. Standing at a podium that read “Treatment not tents”, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, called the bills “a paradigm shift” and a message to voters that policymakers intend to clean up the streets. California’s new laws also exemplify two broad shifts in mental health care in America: the building of more beds for patients suffering from mental illness…
2023-10-19 07:32:02
Source from www.economist.com
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