I used to daydream about homelessness until I did it for 6 years. You're surrounded by threats and your limbic system is in overdrive, deindividuation kicks in and takes a year of being rehoused before you're back to being the same person. Those daydreams generally stop after taking a hike or twenty over the weekends.

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gboss 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm really impressed you got out of that! Thanks for sharing, the best thing to help homeless people must be prevent them from being homeless in the first place.

	▲	Loughla 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was homeless for a year. My experience is that the best way to help homeless people is in giving them housing while mandating extensive drug/alcohol counseling and/or extremely invasive mental health treatments. There are some people who have just fallen on bad times (I was that), but a WIDE majority of the people I was around that year needed extreme help. When I say extreme, I mean borderline removing their agency to make decisions for themselves. It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies. It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this