A Moral Dilemma RE Homelessness

[Angrboda]

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.

I have to agree at least a little with this. Going through psychosis was ridiculous, but if someone came along and could have simply snapped me out of it then I would not have learned nearly as much. I've learned the consequence of not taking care of oneself, how to manage my emotions better, and a lot of fear/anxiety disappeared from going through such experiences. I also learned to trust medication, but more importantly - to assert myself regarding my medication, to stand up for myself if I don't like a drug they put me on and also to stick with what is working.

But there are some people who will not be able to learn after a certain point - going back to my usage of psychosis, something like a third of people do not respond to medications. So it is a situational judgement, but yeah a lot of times people can really learn from their shitty experiences.

I'm a person who doesn't respond to medication (and am wholeheartedly in love with my psychosis). It isn't about "curing" the illness, that's certainly helpful, but the ultimate goal is just to be able to live with this or these things in your life. I'm on a moderate dosage of one of the few anti-psychotics that I respond to, and it does nothing to change my thinking. But changing the thinking isn't the ultimate goal. Changing the behavior is. And there are many paths to that goal that don't depend on removing the illness. I attend group therapy, individual, I'm social, I take time to learn and enjoy, I get free food and housekeeping -- all these are pieces to the puzzle of keeping me living well in spite of a terrible illness which does not seem to have any fix that will make it right. If a person has an incurable cancer, is that the end of thinking about how to manage and live with the illness? No. Coping with an illness is a much broader question than just fixing what, to many, appears the problem. It's a much more multi-dimensional question than that. People with severely degraded schizophrenic symptoms may never be able to live normally. But do they live better or worse if "supplemental interventions" (money, therapy, supportive social relations, skills training, etc) are removed, or do they live worse lives. Throwing up your hands because somebody doesn't respond to medication is, imo, taking a rather simplistic and wrong-headed approach.