Psychiatrists at S.F. convention get dose of reality on streets
Members of the nation's largest psychiatric association discovered San Francisco's mentally ill homeless problem up close this week, as they stepped out of their annual convention and were surprised -- some say shocked -- by the legions of people living on the street.
The worst, however, came when an official of the American Psychiatric Association, a Baltimore doctor known for being an advocate for the indigent mentally ill, was assaulted by an apparently homeless man with a history of psychiatric problems.
"It's kind of shocking," said James McNulty, head of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. "I've been walking around the hotels and up the hill to Fisherman's Wharf. It was very disheartening."
My company bailed five years ago when we had to roll street people away from the door and step over human waste in the morning. A casual broken-car- window pool became a running joke in the building cafe. SF is awash in <i>homeless</i>...not all are mentally ill. Many are part of a street-wise homeless counterculture who use the monthly cash stipend to supplement their drug and alcohol habit.
Of course the good doctors and our uber-liberal pols see it as a funding issue, not a failed policy which created waves of homeless during Mayor Art Agnos's term. Agnos suspended the rousting of homeless and began to fund cash assistance and flea bag hotels.
Proposition N created a means to to defund the cash payments and provide real solutions. However as you might expect the courts intervened and the Board of Supes dithered.
Meanwhile, Supervisor Gavin Newsom, who wrote the "Care Not Cash" proposition, asked the Board of Supervisors to adopt his original plan. The measure would reduce the city's welfare payments to roughly 3,000 of San Francisco's homeless residents from the $320 to $395 a month they receive now to $59 a month plus housing -- including at shelters -- and food.
Just as Liberals clung to the welfare state long past it's obvious failure point, so they cling to treating homelessness by enabling the entrenched homeless to live on our streets. Summer will bring a new influx of young run-away hustlers to prey on tourists...some will stay and adapt to life on the streets of San Francisco. Why not?
Posted by feste at May 22, 2003 09:07 PM | TrackBackAs a psychiatrist I witnessed the ideological hijacking by the left of mental illness. First they asserted that the mentally ill saw through the madness of capitalist society (R.D. Laing) to the deeper truth of our shared oppression. Then they "liberated" the mentally ill from institutions and created the army of homeless psychotics. This almost made NYC unlivable and, no doubt is doing the same for San Francisco. Meanwhile, the mentally ill became pawns in the liberal-left assault on Amerika, and wind up far worse off than had they remained institutionalized.
www.doctor-horsefeathers.com
I absolutely agree with your assessment. SF also has the additional issue of runaway teens. Since the mid-60's the teen street population swells in the summer. As heroin became their drug of choice, relatively cheap and available, violence escalated considerably. Add alcohol, meth and crack addicts, toss in a small percentage of street hustlers, petty thieves and sex workers and you have the current street population.
Of course I am only an observer of the street population but SF seems to have a small army of substance abusers. I could see a sidewalk encampment from my office window and the drug trade was very much out in the open as was the violence. When a dead homeless man was found in our doorway, our board decided it was time to relocate.
I often wonder how far out of control the streets must become before San Franciscans are convinced that that something must be done. We are told there is little money or will to assist the mentally ill and/or drug treatment. The cost to tourism and the tax base must be in the hundreds of millions over the last two decades. However, given the city's ultra-left political blinkers, I have little hope anything will change.
Sadly, the city rises in my view enchanting as ever from afar, but it may as well be on the moon. I haven't shopped or dined in SF since my employer left in '98.
Posted by: feste at May 24, 2003 08:48 AMI work as a tourguide in San Francisco and had many of these psychiatrists on my buses during the APA conference. They were shocked that one of their own members, and a very high-ranking one at that, was attacked in broad daylight near Union Square (Grant Street, 11:00 AM). Yet none of them found it strange or ironic, that the very doctors authorized to release these dangerous people into the public should then themselves become the target of violence.
Sometimes I remember that book (and film), "The Nun's Story", about a Belgian nun in the 1930's who worked in a mental hospital. All patients were suspected as dangerous and the nuns worked in pairs, never alone, since they could be attacked. Sure enough, the young and over-confident nun offers a drink of water late at night to one such patient, without calling for help for another nun, and is almost beaten to death. Another nun is stabbed in the back by a patient's dagger and killed. These were the scenes that went through my mind when Dr. Veetra Jayaram, shoved to the sidewalk with great force, wound up in SF General, apparently not quite dead.
If she had died, I wonder if the hullabaloo would have increased.
Yet, in spite of the big story in the SF Chronicle on the following day, there was NO follow-up. Aaran Matthew Hull, 32, was to be tried for deadly assault on June 4th, defended by a lawyer Mr. Goldman. Did the trial take place? DId Jayaram drop charges because of the embarassment to her profession? It could have put the whole 19,000 doctors on trial!!!!
I have been trying to follow up myself, but the story has disappeared. Where is Aaron Hull? Back on the streets, harassing, beating and begging, like all the rest?
What a city! What a stench! What a mayor!
Posted by: Mark at June 13, 2003 11:59 AM