becca333
Posts: 1050
Joined: 4/11/2006
Status: offline
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On the OP topic:
The homeless situation in Sydney is that many have mental illnesses, and are homeless due to the pathetic mental health care (non)system. The majority of our homeless here have problems with mental illness, drugs, alcohol, or combinations of all three. There's never enough shelters, and not nearly enough is done about it. And the average age of the homeless is dropping fast.
A lot of people don't realise how close we all are to the edge - lose your job, miss a mortgage payment, and you could go from good life to homeless in a few weeks. It has happened. It's so easy to fall, and so terribly hard to climb back up again - almost nobody gets back out of the homeless trap without help from someone else.
It's so sad the way people become marginalised, and then they're invisible. I hate seeing those poor women along certain parts of the highway at night - probably not homeless, but definitely marginalised. Each one is someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's mother. And they stand and wait for some motorist to stop, or a truckie to pick them up, they work the highway each night. It's heartbreaking - we should be able to give each person a better life than that.
For the homeless, substance abuse is a general problem. For some it's the reason they ended up where they are, for others it's the only way to dull the misery. And, of course, once you start you now have one more problem making it even harder to fight your way back. It's called 'Culture of Poverty' - the strategies you use to survive make it almost impossible to get out of the trap.
We need LOTS more drug treatment facilities, lots more cheap/subsidised/free housing, and a welfare system that doesn't penalise people for working (benefits cut out when you start to earn, so it's better to stay unemployed). Not that most homeless can access any kind of government welfare - as has been stated, no address means you've fallen out of the system.
I wish someone would post from a country that has a great way of dealing with this. There don't seem to be any good answers to the problem.
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RE: Whilst you are fast asleep in your bed... - 
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