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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful story but with a sad undertone.

A large percentage of the homeless have autism [1]. And that really sucks. If these people don't have support, their lives can turn miserable fast. And unfortunately it's just way too easy for these people to end up in abusive situations.

It's a lot of work to care for people with autism (moderate to severe). There is no standard for what they need, their capabilities can be all over the board. Some of them are capable like ronny in this story and they can hold down jobs. But others need 24/7 caregiving in order to survive. Unfortunately I don't think those with severe autism survive for long when they become homeless.

I hope this story at very least gets people to view the homeless a little differently. They aren't all there because of vices or failure. A large percentage are there because society does not care for those with mental disabilities. It was good on this story to highlight that Ron had problems with gambling. Autism does, in fact, make an individual more prone to various addictions.

My point in writing this, please have some humanity about the homeless. I get that they can be inconvenient. They are people and they aren't necessarily bad people due to their circumstances.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29633853/

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Happy Christmas, folks!

> please have some humanity about the homeless

In the US, the homeless population exploded, in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas.

Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have very specialized and advanced skills, which can sometimes be applicable to making a living (like programming, or visual design).

However, we're "different," which often leads to being shunned/traumatized by neurotypicals. I got used to folks eventually walking away from relationships, for no discernible reason. Used to really bother me, until I figured it out. Now, I just take it in stride, and appreciate whatever time I get to spend with folks. If anyone has seen The Accountant (the first one), there's a scene, near the end, where Ben Affleck's character is considering putting the moves on Anna Kendrick's character, but remembers his father, admonishing him that people will always end up being frightened of "the difference," and he sneaks out, instead. That scene almost brought me to tears, I could relate so well.

For some folks, it's much worse. They can be relentlessly bullied, abused, locked up, or shunned, which leaves psychological scars that manifest as antisocial behavior, so they are never given a chance to show what they can do.

People like this really are at the mercy of fate, and the people they come into contact with throughout their lives. Its so unfair. But thankfully this story had a good outcome.

Happy Christmas to you and everyone else here as well :)

Thankfully LLMs have ingested enough of human writing that one afflicted in such a way can describe the exact set of circumstances and ask the LLM how they made the other people feel, and figure out why they got expelled from the group this time. It never stops happening for us. I'm 42 now and it's happened twice this past year. But at least now I can figure out what it is I did wrong and how to prevent that from happening again.

I'm trying to understand this better, possible to share any examples?

Not going to share a personal example, but eg plug "I bought my mom a vacuum cleaner for her birthday. Why did she get mad at me? she keeps complaining about the old one!" into ChatGPT vs find me any human willing to sit down and have that as an actual discussion with me as a human of any age. I'm just supposed to get it? I'm a fucking monster and unworthy of being loved because I need that explained to me? "You should just know!"

Fuck people.

To be honest, that can happen to any kid depending on the background

I grew up at a time when a home appliance was an acceptable gift for the woman in charge.

I heard women complaining progressively more through time, and now it is not an acceptable gift.

> I grew up at a time when a home appliance was an acceptable gift for the woman in charge.

This is also how I grew up (my parents were a little bit more on the conservative side). This together with the fact that I am not deeply knowledgable in the US-American common practices also made it hard for me to understand why the mother was angry about this gift, in particular considering that she did complain about the old one.

I bought a expensive fancy pan for my wife's birthday a few years ago. We both cook, clean and do groceries and chores equally so it never occurred to me that it was inappropriate. We both like cooking. I'm more of a stewpot guy while she's better in general at "pan stuff" and had been complaining about the old pan. She chided me a bit for spending so much on a pan and there was that.

But when I mentioned it over coffee at work most of my female colleagues were aghast. I defended myself saying something like "It's the 21st century, we are way past the point that I can't gift a pan to my wife" and they said "Well that might be at YOUR home!", and I learned a thing.

Reminds me of this old commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkkW6dwG2KY

I would like a vacuum as gift. The one I currently have isn't very good. Not sure what her problem was.

I have no idea why someone would get mad about getting a vacuum cleaner as a gift. It's boring, sure, but if you keep complaining about your old one, it seems pretty thoughtful.

The implication is that it implies vacuuming is that persons responsibility to the point of giving them "their" tools instead of it being a shared purchase for the house.

Not everyone will care, but this is a stereotypical type of present likely to trigger anger and resentment in the recipient for a reason.

Everyone’s situation is different. But typically the reason this offends is because for a stay at home mom a vacuum is a work tool. If the current vacuum is broken then you should just get a new one. It shouldn’t take the place of a Christmas present, which is the opportunity to get her something related to her personal interests rather than her job.

Interesting point of view. But it's common for a man to get a work tool as present (e.g. a drill or a set of wrenches), with the obvious implication that the man will usually be the one who will have to use that tool to fix things around the house - and I have never seen anyone find that offensive. So what makes the vacuum cleaner different?

For anyone that like to do DIY, that's not a work tool, that's a play tool that is coincidentally a work tool to do work.

Same thing back at you. The vacuum is a play tool to anyone who finds cleaning to be “fun”.

There’s whole genres of cleanup games on steam which are extremely popular, profitable, and well reviewed.

One of my favorite vectrex games is a Pac-Man clone where you play as a vacuum.

Powerwash simulator is occasionally fun. There's shiny rewards, I don't have to deal with potential bad weather, and there's no random patches that take 20 times to get rid of. If I don't feel like powerwashing simulator, it will wait for me, forever, with no ill consequences or social judgement.

If I never wash my actual driveway, the same is not true. Therefore I will need to wash it at times when it's unpleasant or I don't want to, and it will take longer than powerwashing a driveway in Powerwash simulator.

In this scenario (again, everyone’s situation is different) DIY is more often a hobby for the husband. Repairs are infrequent enough that you could just hire someone as needed, but the husband chooses to do it.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s not his full time job.

Without context, the reaction is bizarre. There must be some back story that you omitted; maybe something about the mother previously asking other people in the family to vacuum, and being ignored?

My wife and I, by the way, are giving each other a joint New Year gift of a fancy robot vacuum cleaner: it's the best sort of gift, useful, elegant, and something that one would be reluctant to spend the money on otherwise.

A joint gift is very different, and a joint gift of a household appliance that reduces the work doubly so.

The reaction is a result of the gift implying that the work is the responsibility of the individual recipient.

It's not a universal reaction, but common enough that it is a frequent trope in movies and TV.

Your mother is a unique person. Only she can explain her actions, if she wants to. Chatgpt or any other person won't be able to. Your mother may be neurodivergent in ways that make it impossible for someone else else to answer for her, or ways that make it hard to answer for herself.

You are worthy of being loved even if people close to you aren't able to express it to you.

what did you do wrong?

My sympathies. And it’s sad to see you call it “what it is you did wrong”. Thus, also my apologies, for whenever I am on the wrong side of such interactions.

That’s an interesting idea. My main concern would be hallucinations. They could be damaging.

What would it even hallucinate? You wouldn't be asking it to cite a court case from 2004 that doesn't exist and it wouldn't invent people you didn't tell it about in the first place.

I've been reading about how chatbots have been reinforcing paranoid delusions. If the person asking, was really trying to justify their own approach, and blame others (or that's what the chatbot perceives), the chatbot may go along, instead of saying "What the hell were you thinking?".

I mean, the LLM's words are just generated words, not gospel from the heavens. If you're self-aware enough to be able to extract value from the words, and not go off the deep end with it, which it seem like you are, run it through as many SOTA online models and however many offline models you can fit on your hard drive, and compare all of their advice if you're really that worried about it, but make up a soap opera scenario, like some thing that ends with "and then I slept with her sister" and see just how many of them say "good job getting it in!" and not "you're an asshole", if you need to prove to yourself that, as with everything, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the news.

Grok: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNQ_26f4c367-77ed-4b6e-be55-83...

Claude: https://claude.ai/share/dca96b18-d583-4e14-b805-725d2e060761

Interestingly ChatGPT won't let me share a chat link for the same input text due to not passing a moderation filter, but you can plug that same gauche prompt into chat.com for yourself. Couldn't find the share button in Gemini.

Oh my first reply didn't address your question. Yes, if you're a malignant narcissist that seeks reassurance that it's okay you're a piece of shit, then it can be used that way too. I don't read you as one, however.

LLMs will invent all those things without even being asked.

Especially on topics for which there is little data or few sources.

Ask it a really specialized question - the kind of domain-specialized topic not openly and extensively published. Something post-doctoral research equivalent.

It will happily invent all the details. Then if you ask to confirm if those things actually exist, it will apologize and say they do not.

To be blunt, LLMs only seem intelligent because they were trained on moderate intelligence publications and people mainly ask low intelligence questions.

Such a large fraction of human communication is non-verbal (and, unless you're actively studying this sort of thing as a neurodivergent person trying to fit in) unconscious that it's hard for me to imagine this working very well on average. The LLM simply couldn't possibly get enough relevant input. And even emotional reactions purely to words are informed by context that the LLM didn't experience and the user won't know was important, so the LLM can only wildly speculate.

I'd like to encourage you to resist the "what I did wrong" framing, because it's definitely not a given that you did anything wrong in any given circumstance. Sometimes neurotypical people are just completely unreasonable, and sometimes they will try to manipulate you (and each other).

The strange part to me is that neurodivergence is commonly explained in terms of inability to see things from another point of view (see the classical "what will X person say is in the box?" test). But supposedly neurotypical people demonstrate what seems to me like a stunning lack of empathy (or more generally, ability to comprehend other worldviews) all the time. Especially when politics is involved.

> But supposedly neurotypical people demonstrate what seems to me like a stunning lack of empathy (or more generally, ability to comprehend other worldviews) all the time. Especially when politics is involved.

Politics is about power fights: whose argument will convince the mass that in this case violence (laws -> state authority) is appropriate or not appropriate.

So even if the other person is able to comprehend other worldviews (which I would claim is actually often, though not always, the case), there exist very strong incentives to ignore these other world views in your actions when politics is involved.

> But supposedly neurotypical people demonstrate what seems to me like a stunning lack of empathy (or more generally, ability to comprehend other worldviews) all the time.

IME religion facilities this phenomenon. In-group members (esp men) get forgiveness and freedom from consequences (perhaps conditioned on saying magic words). Whilst out-groups get "forgiveness" with extra consequences.

Do you mean Christianity? Islam is full of consequences for members - it has a system of laws and punishments. It has forgiveness too but some crimes are unforgiveable even by God. Meanwhile, out-groups are more like enemies that sometimes should be killed if they don't cooperate.

Having some laws for bad behavior doesn’t mean Islam doesn’t let men shirk responsibility. Women are expected to cover themselves because of men being expected to have so little self control.

Most western countries also have laws requiring women to cover themselves. It's still a law in either case and still has punishments not "say a prayer and you're off the hook".

Freakishly weirdly precise memory that doesn't work in other ways can be used to relayed relevant details to ChatGPT. I'll describe the weird face she made when I said that thing or the exact position of her body and the exact level of pressure with which she touched me on the arm and exactly where on my arm, for example.

As far as the framing, it's helped me realize that actually, hey, sometimes it is their fault and they are being unreasonable and I actually didn't do anything wrong, they just don't like me. I mean yeah, that's also a thing.

Asking ChatGPT for that sort of advice seems like a horrific idea. Trying to learn interactions by written means can only lead to some very alien ideas.

Plus your questions will contain your mistakes, and what you take from any answers would reinforce your misunderstandings rather than correct them.

It's hard to suggest better learning means via the HN medium.

I learnt a lot when I carefully gave attention to a friend I deeply trusted, training my intuition based on their interactions, plus they trusted me enough to sometimes attempt to explain their intuitive reactions.

Where are these alien ideas are going to come from? Did aliens come to Earth and their complete works got smuggled into the training data for ChatGPT, and not the collected works of humanity? Every poem that's been digitized, every human psychology textbook, every self-help book?

My point is that if you want to understand human interactions, you need to participate in them.

Rationally analysing human interactions via writing and psychology will screw up your leaning.

Children just learn by doing and are only guided in a gross sense.

If you want to understand people, one must learn like a child does.

These my personal beliefs that I apply to myself. Trying to find you some scientific papers would be counterproductive and destroy the point I am making.

I think the problem is that non-divergent people really cannot comprehend an inability to perceive non-verbal communication. Nonverbal communication is like breathing, or eating - it's something that just works for them; they don't have to think about it. It's scary and weird to them when they meet people that can't do it.

Then there are those of us for whom social situations are a 3-billion-line case/esac statement.

  case situation in
    shesmiledandlaughedafterthejoke)
      shelikedthejoke()
    ;;
    shesmiledandlaughedafterthejokebutlookedsideways)
      shesboredanddidntlikethejoke()
    ;;
    thejokewasfunnyoncesoitmustbefunnyeverytimeeven200times)
      crashandburn()
    ;;
    etc)
    ;;
  esac

people just see what, to them, is obnoxious or boorish behavior. So, divergent people must first understand that they are divergent and what that means, and then they must try to put themselves in the shoes of the people they interact with. Is it fair? Life isn't fair - but you either want to fit in and interact reasonably, or you don't.

Somehow, I managed to get married. My wife helped me understand what I was missing - it was like gaining eyesight after never having it or even understanding eyesight was a thing people had.

Yes, many people lack empathy. That is no excuse for you (or me!) to learn and use empathy.

Non-neurotypicals can receive bad treatment from neurotypicals. But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant. The corollary of not knowing when they're offending people, is that they also don't know when they're receiving tolerance - which is actually a lot; although it's understandable that this is not obvious.

> But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant.

I didn’t get that at all from what they said tbh

Yeah not trying to imply the GP did. Just offering another perspective.

The default instinctual reaction of nearly everyone to someone who lets the mask slip and exhibits spectrum behaviours is somewhat like they would react to seeing a large spider. The knee jerk baked in emotional response is a mix of fear, disgust, and 'other'ing. OP isn't making some claim that neurotypicals are consciously intolerant. I would, however, make the claim that regardless of what actions people consciously take, this initial reaction is hard to hide and is profoundly impactful to the people who see it a million times.

> The default instinctual reaction of nearly everyone to someone who lets the mask slip and exhibits spectrum behaviours is somewhat like they would react to seeing a large spider. The knee jerk baked in emotional response is a mix of fear, disgust, and 'other'ing. OP isn't making some claim that neurotypicals are consciously intolerant. I would, however, make the claim that regardless of what actions people consciously take, this initial reaction is hard to hide and is profoundly impactful to the people who see it a million times.

Then these neurotypicals should stop their hypocrisis of preaching tolerance and considering themselves to be tolerant.

If the reaction is actually knee jerk/automatic before the upper brain(?)/concious tolerant/empathetic side can take control, is someone a jerk for having that primal response first. I consider myself very tolerant and empathetic and I do my damndest to be that way, but my wife says sometimes it’s not the first thing that shows. I’m trying as hard as I know how. Should I be condemned?

> Should I be condemned?

You shouldn't be condemned, but as I wrote, people should stop the hypocrisy and virtue signalling of pretending to be so insanely tolerant if they have such a primal response.

It's not hypocrisy or virtue signaling if people are choosing to be tolerant.

If someone is standing near the train tracks and sees a train approaching a stalled car, they should be praised for choosing to run over and help even if their initial instinct is to get as far away as possible.

If they didn’t have a negative response, it wouldn’t be tolerance, by definition. Tolerance means engaging with something you have a negative response to.

It's not virtue signaling to try to be better. Stop making this weird.

I may try my hardest to be a great musician, but I'm not and surely won't be anytime soon. It's accepting your current shortcomings that may lead to improvement, not considering yourself good just because you try hard.

It's difficult and it's fine to struggle with it.

> initial reaction is hard to hide and is profoundly impactful to the people who see it a million times

I can relate this very much, and I am "just" 100% blind. I believe what we are talking about is not "neurotypicals" vs "non-neurotypicals", it is really the way society treats anyone with a pertceived disability. We are, even though society tries to keep the mask on, outcasts, and we are regularily enough treated like that we learn on a deep level that we are just not part of the rest of society. Sure, there is a "spectrum" of how good a person with a disability might cope, but at the end of the day, if I throw myself into the masses and have random interactions, I always learn the same lesson: random strangers will keep treating me in a very uncomfortable way. Sure, many people try their best. Some even come across as creepy by trying so hard. But the statistics never changes. I will never feel like a "normal" person, they will make sure I never will.

In a society based around ranking others perceived worth and value, having a disability gets conflated with "being a burden". Silently overcoming a disability and adapting to an unsuitable world becomes the "hustle culture" variant of modern-day working life. Praised for being ultra self-sufficient and "paying our way".

It's harrowing how people prefer donating resources over exerting mental effort to bridge simple psychological boundaries in understanding the different needs of others, especially for disabilities (which nobody chooses to have). I often wonder if the root of this is the individual fear it could happen to us. By exercising empathy, we are reminded that ourselves and our families are vulnerable to disability at any time--from birth to life events this second (injury, illness, luck), existence is vulnerability.

Our intrinsic fears combined with societies lacking safety nets and breathing space has created a positive feedback loop for hyper-individualistic living. Our own bubbles. I try to do the opposite, but it's not easy.

> I will never feel like a "normal" person, they will make sure I never will.

Saying "make sure" suggests intent. I would hope the discomfort causing reactions are an unintentional side effect of ignorance. Because if so then there's hope that even the masses can learn to be more considerate and inclusive.

Ultimately, nearly all of us will develop some physical or mental impairment due to accidents or aging.

If you have been treated repeatedly in an uncomfortable way by strangers, and sometimes even your own family, intent at some point no longer matters to you. It is the end result that counts. I dont have any sympathy for weirdos, they are what they are, but they definitely dont deserve me explaining away their shortcomings. I am the one that has to do home and wrestle with my reaction to them crossing borders they are to dense to even realize exist.

> I will never feel like a "normal" person, they will make sure I never will.

I'm going to tangent a bit here but so far in my life, after observing lots of people discussing things related to this, every single person feels this way.

Every person thinks they're atypical. That they're experiencing things other people don't. That they're different in some way to "everyone else".

Exactly what this means is up to the reader, but it sure implies some interesting ideas here.

Hi there - I’m really sorry about your negative experiences. I read the replies to your comment and felt sad that I didn’t read one that recognised how much work you’re putting into what sounds like an indifferent society - and how unfair that is. I also hope I’m not crossing the line of too much/trying too hard. Frankly, it sounds like a shit place to be.

That happens to anything non-normative. I got that reaction on two things that I suggested:

* that people whose organs are harvested should receive some compensation in the way that other participants in the transaction do: https://web.archive.org/web/20240417004658/https://news.ycom...

After I complained enough people flagged the replies calling me a Nazi but before that they were the top ranked responses.

* I suggested that the franchise should be restricted and the majority of reactions were not considered and simply emotional outbursts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291336

This is the nature of being different: most people don’t bother with the rider; the elephant suffices.

> The corollary of not knowing when [neurotypicals are] offending people, is that they also don't know when they're receiving tolerance

This assertion seemed to go unrecognized in the other replies; I really think it earns a moment of reflection.

I read the parent comment differently:

The corollary of not knowing when [non-neurotypicals are] offending people, is that they also don't know when they're receiving tolerance

I'm more cynical. I think most people really are intolerant. They have their culture which they perhaps unconsciously equate with being good or morally right and anyone who doesn't follow the complex unwritten rules is shunned or abused. Those rules may be mostly good but nobody questions them all, yet almost everybody either enforces them or tacitly tolerates their friends enforcing them. This is probably necessary because if everyone went around inventing their own standards for behavior, people wouldn't get along very well and the outcome of "most people get along with each other most of the time" is itself valuable - it just comes at the cost of those who can't understand it. I think most people can't comprehend the possibility that somebody who seems reasonably normal and intelligent doesn't understand the rules so they must be acting maliciously and deserve punishment.

> In the US, the homeless population exploded, in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions.

... and for good reason, because it turns out that people with no support network (which most mentally ill people and a lot of prisoners are) are perfect victims for all kinds of abuse - both from other inmates and from "wardens". They didn't end up in an asylum randomly, they ended up in there because their family didn't want or could not provide care for them.

And it's not just mental "health" institutions or prisons... all forms of "care" breed abuse. The Catholic Church for example is still reeling from constant discoveries of abused children in orphanages. Elder care institutions, particularly severely understaffed, routinely have to deal with inmates being injured by anything from a lack of care (e.g. bed sores) over physical abuse to sexual abuse [1].

And to make it worse... private/family care without independent oversight is just as bad. A lot of homeschooled children are heavily abused, caregiver burnout and its fallout is also a nasty issue, and particularly in men with dementia, they can also be the abusers.

In the end, the root problem is that we as a society haven't yet figured out how to properly deal with the balance between care work, employment work and rest, and we also haven't figured out how to properly reward and audit care work.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/06/shock...

No, the reason was to save tax money by making mental healthcare a personal responsibility instead of a social one. There were many justifications (abuse, new drugs, etc), but the reason was cost.

Abuse was/is a reason to improve controls over abuse and increase funding to improve conditions. It is not a good reason to abandon inpatient care wholesale. Imagine if we had made the same decision about hospitals or schools, both of which engaged in routine abuse in the early 20th century.

> reason was cost

Yeah, it was supposed to be replaced with a kinder/gentler system, but that never came. They shut down the support system completely with a "we'll figure out how to fix this later" and that never came.

I think the solution is pretty obvious, TBH. Pay people to take care of their family with disabilities. It's often a full time job to take care of someone with a severe disability. Some states do make allowances to pay out to family caregivers, but it's a convoluted system where you have to be employed by a private care agency which is ultimately reimbursed for the care. There's a pointless private business in the way just adding on admin fees.

But there desperately needs to be something in place for people without that support. Parents die/leave/are incarcerated and we really don't have any sort of system setup to handle that.

> I think the solution is pretty obvious, TBH. Pay people to take care of their family with disabilities.

Maybe, but we do also need a way to deal with people whose problems can’t be managed in a family setting.

If a person is prone to violent meltdowns with little provocation, or can’t help but steal from their family to feed an addiction, family caregivers aren’t going to be enough.

>No, the reason was to save tax money

no, it wasn't, it was SCOTUS decision O'Connor v. Donaldson

I think in 2025, it is naïve to think the Supreme Court is apolitical in its rulings. =

But it was considerably more so in the past. What has happened now is that what the anti-federalists warned about is at last visible to everyone.

Wow.

No.

The reason may have been good. The response really wasn't.

> people will always end up being frightened of "the difference"

I've also come to accept this about myself, but I had to stumble through a dark tunnel of feeling inadequate and feeling like an inhuman monster.

The typical list of traits that should not be used as a basis for discrimination is on a spectrum of how instinctual or fear-based it is, which I don't think have seen mentioned in training materials on unconscious bias.

> when they closed down all the mental institutions.

Why on earth did we do this?

I look back at period pieces - films showcasing the 40s, 50s, etc., and it seems like mental institutions would be a wonderful way to house these folks and keep them fed and warm.

I know there were abuses, but we have cameras now. And that's surely better than leaving them on the streets to freeze to death.

I can't imagine it would cost that much, and it would clean up the streets of drugs and homelessness. And reduce the tax on emergency services responding to calls.

I feel so bad for what we as a society do to these people. When my city closed down the local homeless shelter in midtown, the people on Reddit - supposedly leftists - cheered. I was so sad. These are the same people that call me fascist all the time for being a fiscal moderate and saying we shouldn't build subway to the suburbs. Being humanitarian would cost 1/10,000th of that.

If you take the average person who doesn’t have a mental illness and has no relationship with anyone who does, the system we have is pretty well optimized for their needs.

We balance many difficult and inherently conflicting goals, such as:

1) minimizing treatment, which is expensive and does have bad side effects

2) sufficiently good access to treatment where it’s economical for prevention

3) fear of being wrongly hospitalized (error, political motivation, etc.)

4) sufficient ability to lock other people up for frightening or violent behavior in public

It’s a tough problem, but I think the tradeoffs are managed near optimally, granting that the rights and interests of the mentally ill don’t matter at all to most public officials or voters.

Except that those same people then complain about how many homeless people there are.

Reagan's destruction of the mental health system was really awful. The system needed improvement and more accountability, but we need it.

I had an adult step-brother too ill with schizophrenia to be cared for at home (he began making violent threats and stealing things, up to and including my mom's car), but under the current threshold for being compelled to take his medication. My mom (his step-mom; an attorney) spent years trying to find ways to get him help, but he bounced in and out of being homeless and ended up being murdered at about age 60 in a halfway house. Just a stupid, tragic waste of a life and all of the resources mis-allocated.

Sadly, it's just another example of how the US is penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to social services.

I also personally know the waste, stupidity, and cruelty of these situations. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the voters know what they want, and preventing these terrible outcomes is not worth the cost to them.

>I look back at period pieces - films showcasing the 40s, 50s, etc., and it seems like mental institutions would be a wonderful way to house these folks and keep them fed and warm

I'm reading this comment as if you had written:

"The TV show Hogan's Heroes makes being a prisoner of war sound like a jolly good time."

> Why on earth did we do this?

Much has been written about this, but from what little I know, they were abusive, and didn't do the job well. And were abused to keep sane people in.

I've heard that the advent of better drugs was also a factor. Prior to those drugs, there was no alternative other than commitment to mental facilities. The drugs gave the promise of a more manageable life - either by the patient or by their family.

What did we replace them with? Prisons.

About 20 years ago I saw a documentary about the use of prisons as a means to get mental health care. It explored the history that led to mental institutions getting shut down, and how prisons are treating the mentally ill. As crazy as it sounds, the prisons are doing a better job - even the inmates agree. Quite a few inmates said that the biggest problem they had was that they would be released from prison and not get access to the care they were receiving (including medications).

It wasn't trying to paint a rosy picture - they actually said this is, in one sense, an abuse of the prison system and that there needs to be a better way to treat them - but the consensus was "Definitely should not revert to the prior mental institutions!"

>> when they closed down all the mental institutions.

>Why on earth did we do this?

Supreme Court decision, O'Connor v. Donaldson.

Around the same time, much of the US also stopped building housing at the rate needed.

I'm pretty sure there would be far less homeless if there were a lot more homes around.

don't worry, brother, come to Reddit where all we autists live in harmony

Redditors are anything but harmonious with each other

>In the US, the homeless population exploded, in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions

it was the 1970s, SCOTUS decision in O'Connor v. Donaldson, when the court said that the mentally ill who were not dangerous could not be held in institutions against their will. The 1960s had seen a series of scandals concerning callous treatment of inmates in institutions (for example, see Titticut Follies) and that created the climate for deinstitutionalization.

In the US, homeless individuals foremost suffer from financial hardship not mental illness. Consider 39% of homeless individuals are in families [0: Page 17] while 40% have a serious mental illness or drug problem.[1] Many develop these problems while homeless.

Homelessness in the US has also increased by 47% since 2018. [0: Page 2] I doubt homelessness or drug abuse has increased accordingly.

People make the mistake to think otherwise because its not the homelessness you often see.

[0]: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-...

[1]: https://www.kff.org/medicaid/five-key-facts-about-people-exp...

Do you want to fix the typo?

> People make the mistake to think otherwise because its not the homelessness you often see.

Indeed. Those homeless people without mental illness likely have more interest in not being seen, and more ability to avoid it.

> Homelessness in the US has also increased by 47% since 2018. [0: Page 2] I doubt homelessness or drug abuse has increased accordingly.

Not sure what the typo is in here. Surely homelessness has indeed increased in accordance with homelessness.

Take a look at Figure 7 on this page, which indicates that (annual) overdose deaths have more than doubled since 2018: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

If have lived anywhere with a significant drug-addict (opioid or fentanyl) population through this time period, you’ve seen the increase; if you haven’t, you may be lucky for it.

> People make the mistake to think otherwise because its not the homelessness you often see.

I don't think this is a mistake so much as people do not care about the homelessness they don't see.

Ironically when you use the specific words for the homelessness they do care about (unsheltered or unhoused) you're accused of being woke or whatever.

The article you linked shows 12-13% autism-positive rate over N~100 cases, in the UK - and it doesn't distinguish, in the free abstract at least, between minor/moderate/severe, or comorbidities among that population.

I agree that we should be kind to individuals and that understanding an individual's problems can help with that. That said, this paper does not appear to provide convincing evidence that autism is a major contributor to homelessness.

I was pretty careful not to say that autism causes homelessness. Rather, that a significant portion of the homeless have autism.

The abstract says the same thing.

It's much simplier than autism. Most homeless just get divorced and get into alcohol.

I've worked for homeless shelters. But in my country we do have proper care for homeless and autitisc people automatically. No need for private families to care for them. Some still do though.

There’s always someone with the buzzkill. Do you think is really that hard, for those who care, yo find all these sad facts? FFS man, let us celebrate the good a little bit. In this world is really not that hard to find the bad!

I wonder if AI can help them ?

>I wonder if AI can help them ?

No.

No, it can't.

I mostly agree but I think it may be able to help with social skills training in the future.

It can and it does.

>A large percentage are there because society does not care for those with mental disabilities.

This is why it's so frustrating to hear people smugly say we just need to build more houses to solve the homeless crisis.

Attributing 'smugness' is a way to duck the merits of the issue. People with mental disabilities also need a stable roof over their head, security, privacy, heat, a bathroom, a bed.

I expect they need it more (very broadly speaking; people have very different disabilities do different degrees), because it's harder to adapt and survive without it, and therefore more traumatizing and destabilizing.

There is plenty of evidence, and it's common sense, that having a stable shelter and all the things I listed above would greatly help anyone. Humans in every culture have sought shelter for all of history - it's absolutely fundamental to humanity (and other animals!). Depriving people of it results in unending trauma - not a state to begin getting your life together, harm from others and the environment, an inability to accumulate assets, and spending all your time trying to survive.

> Attributing 'smugness' is a way to duck the merits of the issue. People with mental disabilities also need a stable roof over their head, security, privacy, heat, a bathroom, a bed

But it's only one piece of a very complex problem, it's akin to the magical thinking that is incredibly provision everywhere these days. "Just stop using seed oils and America will be healthy again!"

People who have personally dealt with this know the hard truth that simply providing food and shelter isn't enough to stop a significant portion of people ending up in the streets.

> it's only one piece of a very complex problem

Right, who is disagreeing? Name someone. You've created a strawperson.

The knee-jerk anti-liberal responses (maybe that's not your motive, but it is for many) do enormous damage, by preventing good solutions from being implemented. The same thing happens with climate change, now vaccines, and other things. People are so focused on politics that they sacrifice lives and welfare of lots of people. There are good ideas from conservatives too - cutting off half the ideas is stupidity.

> People who have personally dealt with this know the hard truth that simply providing food and shelter isn't enough to stop a significant portion of people ending up in the streets.

In fact, the evidence and advocacy comes from people who have personally dealth with it, and providing housing does result in housing for a significant portion of people.

People need more than housing and that's where it becomes especially complex.

You better check your privilege re: your oppressive claims about humans needing to live somewhere to avoid trauma. Do you think the Roma have a lot of trauma just because they are nomads?

Nomadic people have homes and possessions; they bring the homes with them. They don't live out in the open with nothing like unhoused people are compelled to do.

There are digital nomads too - they usually have money and live in rented places, but they have shelter.

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