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Brian Cates (political columnist for epoch times)We haven’t had a coherent policy for dealing with the mentally ill in many of these United States for almost 50 years now, much less a coherent national policy.Instead of the counseling and therapy and – where it was needed - institutionalization, for 40 years we’ve tried turning the mentally ill loose among the rest of us while pumping them full of drugs. Well guess what?It’s NOT WORKING.And it hasn’t been working for decades.Lawmakers opening the mental hospitals and turning the patients loose and making it almost impossible to commit someone have created a situation where hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people are living on our streets because they cannot function at an adequate level to maintain a job or a normal life.The states have consistently turned a blind eye to the real problem. It’s far easier and less expensive to set up a homeless shelter system that merely feeds and houses the mentally ill locked out on the streets than it does to open new mental health facilities to treat their mental issues.And guess what happens when the homeless population in many of America’s large cities grows to be too big? My research on this led me to the discovery of just how cowardly and corrupt many cities and states are when it comes to handling the mentally ill homeless. I discovered how cities dealt with the problem when their local shelters were full: they were putting the excess homeless on buses and shipping them out to other states.The Truth About the HomelessIn the mid-1980’s when I was arrested for blocking the doors to an abortion clinic, my sentence involved many hours of community service. I and two others from my small Bible college opted to serve those hours at a homeless shelter in nearby St. Paul, Minnesota. The media’s depiction of the homeless during Reagan’s second term was calculated to blame the popular President for the noticeable increase in the number of people living on America’s streets. The conventional wisdom that was presented in the daily news was that “the homeless are just like you and me” and “we are all just one missing paycheck away from being homeless ourselves”.Well no. I got an up close and personal look over the course of three months at the homeless in the Minneapolis area. What I discovered is that the news media was, as usual, lying. The homeless are not “just like you and me” and these poor people did not end up being homeless after only missing a paycheck or two. Far from it.The vast majority of the homeless that I encountered on the frozen streets of St. Paul were either drug addicts or mentally ill.The first brutal truth I learned is that most of the homeless are living on the streets – even in the midst of the most awful of conditions – because they want to be there. The idea had been fostered that the homeless would instantly leap at the chance to get off the streets.I watched relatives get down on their knees on snow- and ice-covered sidewalks and beg their freezing father, mother, brother, son, or daughter to come home with them, to no avail.You must understand: these people were not in a rational state of mind. They could not make proper decisions for themselves. They would turn down being taken to a warm house to stay on the streets and suffer. Even though these people were literally freezing, they would not leave.Many would not come into the shelters either because the shelters had rules about drugs and alcohol. So in the middle of a freezing Minnesota winter, I watched in amazement as many of the homeless refused to come into the shelters even in the worst weather.It’s Time to Lay Aside the Fake CompassionPeople in that kind of mental state used to be formerly institutionalized for their own good. But that all began changing in the 1960’s and by the early 1980’s it had become almost impossible to involuntarily commit someone to a mental care facility. Thomas Wictor has talked a lot about this, first on Twitter and now on Quod Verum, how the closing of the mental hospitals and tightening of the laws on involuntary commitment were huge mistakes cloaked in ‘compassion language’ at the time. But that compassion wasn’t real.There is absolutely nothing compassionate about putting a mentally ill person who can’t make rational choices for him or herself a on freezing street in the dead of winter, or in the blazing heat of the sun during a heat wave in the summer. But it continues to happen. The sad fact is we slowly got used to this over the past few decades. Incrementally we came to accept it. And we shouldn't have.Stop Passing The Buck And Demand ChangeAnd the role of the drugs in all of this cannot be overlooked. Pumping a person full of drugs to keep them calm and sedate when they are having serious mental issues is not an answer, and it’s not really helping the person or their real problems. And now after more than 40 years of pursuing these failing policies of replacing counseling and institutionalization with homelessness and drugs, we have more disturbed people than ever in our midst, some of who are acting out violently.—-Brian Cates speaks the awful truth. —my husband Lorin William Doolan Demikhov have been volunteering at a homeless shelter for 6 years now, and will vouch for every word he stated on here. Our homeless shelter here in town is used as a dumping grounds for the mentally ill, after they are disharged from hospitals.