BREAKING: Secret Service says fence-jumper made it through North Portico doors of White House
@AP: BREAKING: Secret Service says fence-jumper made it through North Portico doors of White House
m.twitter.com/AP
= new reply since forum marked as read
72 hours and a prescription are certainly not enough if you release a mentally ill person into the street, where the stress alone is likely to drive them to do extreme things.
Before opining that they need to be "locked up", though, perhaps consider that this has something to do with the collapse of welfare infrastructure in California (and I'm sure other States as well). While the situation differs from county to county, "welfare" reform meant making it impossible for single people without children to live on welfare. For instance, in the county where I live you can only get General Assistance welfare (which is a LOAN, not "free money"
for 3 months out of the year unless you have a doctor's support as being too disabled to work: and doctors seem particularly disinclined to support this - either out of personal prejudice or legal concerns. Once you do have the diagnostic code you need, you can get at max, $336 a month that goes DIRECTLY TO A LANDLORD. Note that's less than half of market rate for a room in major urban areas (especially for places that are convenient to to downtown areas, which people on welfare need since there is NO TRANSPORTATION SUBSIDY). The only "welfare" single people are eligible for besides this is food stamps. So how are they supposed to pay for basic necessities: bills, hygiene products, light bulbs, laundry, stamps, cleaning supplies, bus tickets to REQUIRED appointments, etc.?
This situation is deliberately made impossible to motivate people to get off welfare by working. However, if you are disabled (or mentally ill), and you are applying for SSI - a multi-year process - you will screw your case by working. By working, you prove you can work.
Furthermore, you do not just do your paperwork and get "ensconced" in the welfare system. Social Services defaults to cutting you off (which jeopardizes your housing arrangements and ability to obtain food) every time something changes for you and THEY MAKE AN ERROR. Click my sig if you want to see what happens when I tried to do some casual work. A further ramification not mentioned there is I lost Medi-Cal, and I'm still struggling to get it back.
So the mentally ill generally have difficulty holding down a job and retaining a stable housing situation. They are at the bottom of society. And welfare policy in California is such as to DELIBERATELY DRIVE PEOPLE INTO HOMELESSNESS in the name of hoping some of them will "fall through the cracks" and save the State some money.
And your opinion about the problem is we aren't locking enough people up and they aren't taking their meds?
No.
The problem is California's sense-it-makes-not welfare policies are PRODUCING the mentally ill and EXACERBATING the problem, and people are choosing to pull opinions out of their ass about it instead of learning something about how thousands of real people are literally being tortured on American soil.
that sucks. 
I'm sort of wondering what is happening regarding the indigent care program because I was supposed to be sent a plastic card for prescriptions and it didn't arrive this week. It's only a few days overdue, but I'll have to refill my insulin prescription within the next couple of weeks so I'll need to follow-up next week. I've come to expect the worst when dealing with government services recently so if something goes correctly then I'll be pleasantly surprised.
Good luck getting your situation resolved quickly. 
But wasn't the intruder from Texas...?
