A Moral Dilemma RE Homelessness

[Angrboda]

I'm of considerably less mixed opinion on this. Enabling only leads to worse outcomes, for all involved. We want to help, to eliminate the immediate suffering we see about to occur, but doing so often leads to more suffering in the long term. When I was first hospitalized for depression, a friend had also been recently hospitalized for depression. I forget exactly what they said to her, but to paraphrase, they told her she'd either accept responsibility for her depression and managing, or she would spend the rest of her life in and out of the hospital. I don't know that I agree in absolute, but there's a core of truth there. I spent the next 5 years, myself, with about 25 hospitalizations, many of them involuntary. I'm not saying I wasn't taking responsibility for myself, as I concluded relatively early that, even if people are willing to help, ultimately, when I get sick, it is all on me to do something; nobody else can step in and be responsible "for me" if I have not chosen to be responsible for myself, and am taking steps to behave and respond to the situation and my needs. At the end of the day, you only have yourself. It starts with you. Once you've decided to help yourself, and have started the process of how to do that (taking care of oneself when one's own brain is working against you is something that involves a long learning process, with a lot of education, experience, and trial and error). You cannot substitute for their judgement and their choosing to seek to be right; and putting band-aids on the immediate crisises only serves to defuse another potential opportunity to learn, another chance to realize where they need to be going, rather than just where they want to be going. As a Taoist, I'm somewhat programmatically against depriving people of the opportunity to learn from experience, when learning from experience is what is needed, and may be the only way to learn it. I don't consider it "tough love." It is, to me, just doing the right thing, for them, and for me.