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Old 05-19-2010, 06:45 PM
  # 8 (permalink)  
Bucyn
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Join Date: Nov 2009
Posts: 223
Option 3.

Every day I come home from work and get off the Turnpike. And everyday there's a homeless person at the first stoplight. Usually it's a woman. Sometimes she disappears, but she always comes back in new clothes and a new backpack. Over the years she looks worse and worse and worse. She used to hold up a sign, "Need money to get to family in AZ". Now her sign says, "Hungry, thirsty, any help needed. Bless us all". I watched her hair grow from ear length to mid back length. I watched her get fatter and fatter. I watched her go from someone who looked like she was in her early 30s to someone who looks like one of those old dried up apple ladies. She limps now, very heavily. She didn't used to. She looks a lot like my xAH's exwife who has some kind of psychotic/bipolar/schizophrenic problem and is as far as I know is a street person who gets Baker Acted a couple times a year. It never helps.

About a week ago, she was sitting on the rail and was peeing on herself. She didn't care. As I sat at the red light, I saw the dark stain spread down her inner thighs, she just sat there staring into space.

Probably her problem is mental illness, not alcoholism. But like xAH's exwife, I guess she gets Baker Acted regularly, and when she's not there, there's this short, rotund, grizzly guy who clearly does have alcohol problems (how they figure out who gets to be at which corner when is a mystery to me, but there's only one and it's clearly the woman's corner and the guy gets it only by default). I've seen him drop trou and poop right there by the side of the road.

Baker Acting doesn't help these people. All you get is, "Yep, she/he's an alcoholic; yep, he/she's mentally ill; yep, they need to take their meds/quit drinking; good luck and hope you straighten out." Baker acting doesn't help anyone who is not ready to help themselves. They go in for a few days, whine about being there, connive to look like they don't belong there or are willing to comply with the program, whatever it takes to get released...and then they go right back to the lifestyle they had before.

No one gets better until they decide to get better and decide to follow their treatment program. It's not illegal to pee on yourself in public (unless you drop trou). You aren't a danger to yourself or others.

You will get all worked up trying to get them in a hospital against their will, be anxious the whole time they are in there that they are being held long and enough and if the doctors see 'the truth', turn yourself inside out hoping hoping hoping that THIS will make them see reality, that THIS will be 'their bottom'; and they will get out and go right back to what they were doing because they still don't want to get better.

Let it go. Let HP. Focus on yourself and don't interfere. You really can't help or harm him; but you can do both those things to yourself.

(A long way of saying the State of FL doesn't much care and won't give people the treatment they REALLY need because it's expensive, there are too many people who need it, and it doesn't work anyway until they want it.)
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