https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/housing/article/involuntary-treatment-anosognosia-homelessness-law-20808832.php
>Proponents hope Senate Bill 1164 will allow for interventions before there is an immediate danger — because by then, it can be too late. Walter Macias said he asked the police in San Antonio for help several times before his brother’s psychosis led him to believe that his home, where he lived with his mother, was a fort defending Earth from aliens. The brother, Fernando, told Walter he was buying an AR-15 to prepare for the invasion.
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>When the police arrived to detain him on a mental health warrant, Fernando opened fire, leading to a 25-hour standoff. Their mother was killed by the state SWAT team in the crossfire, and Fernando was taken to jail, where he lost more than 100 pounds and died after not receiving dialysis for months, according to a wrongful death suit.
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>“This bill would’ve saved my family’s tragedy,” Walter Macias said. He said he’d reached out to authorities periodically for two decades before the incident and that the realization that the law couldn’t do anything had left him feeling helpless.
Really? You trust that the same system that murdered your mother and starved your brother would behave differently with this new legislation because... what? Because they have a new excuse for involuntary commitment on top of the ones they already have?
This is nothing more than a pretext to round up people and throw them into concentration camps under the guise of "they don't realize they are ill."
>By 2024, James Caruthers, director of public affairs at the Coalition for the Homeless in Houston and Harris County, had noticed what he called “a groundswell to say mental health and homelessness are almost inseparable … and we have to be a lot more draconian.”
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>Conservative think tanks, like the Cicero Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation, had begun calling for the nation’s homeless strategy to shift from a focus on housing to a focus on treating mental illness and substance abuse. The Cicero Institute explicitly urged states to amend civil commitment laws “to make it easier to help those who cannot help themselves.”
They're not even speaking in coded language here, y'all. This has nothing to do with mental health and everything to do with stopping what works --- housing first --- and starting round-ups.
>A group of psychiatrists, law professors, judges (including one whom Pope Francis had recognized for his work involving involuntary treatment) and others had just spent three years examining the same question. The Model Legal Processes Work Group concluded that states should include anosognosia as part of their commitment criteria, but that such changes would have to be made alongside investments in housing and quality mental health treatment services for the system to work.
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>...
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>The bill authored by Zaffirini did not, however, go as far as to add funding for housing or mental health treatment services.
Surprise surprise, SB 1164 doesn't do shit for housing *or* treatment (https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/analysis/html/SB01164H.htm). It's purely a mechanism for throwing people away.
>“There are a lot of people in Houston that are praising your work on this. I know that you have worked very closely with HPD and stakeholders that are trying to end homelessness. I know this has been a priority of Mayor Whitmire, our former colleague. So, on behalf of many organizations in Houston, thank you and your team for all the work and your efforts.”
Calling HPD a "stakeholder" in this process is insulting. They're the enforcers tasked with sweeping the homeless.
>Moving forward, he said, the nation would have to make sure that it wasn’t just providing housing.
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>“(We need to make sure) we’re providing for those who have mental illness, those that have addiction. And so I’m very encouraged by what I see here today.”
But y'all aren't even providing the housing to start with! What you are building are concentration camps, plain and simple. And folks' classism and disgust for the homeless are making it all possible.
#deia #homelessness #InvoluntaryCommitment #5150 #MentalIllness #txlege #HoustonChronicle #ableism #HoustonTX #Houston #htx #anosognosia #MentalHealth
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