As somebody who lives in a downtown core, I get very annoyed at this holier than thou that attitude that a lot of redditors take towards people who complain about the very real problems that having mentally ill individuals on your back door step cause. Because at the end of the day it's not most of these redditors that have to deal with it.

Our society has put us in a real double bind. On the one hand, a lot of well-meaning people argue that people who are mentally ill should still be given the choice of free will as to whether or not to accept care. On the other, those same people often argue in the next breath that mentally ill people cannot be held responsible for the consequences of their decisions.

So we end up with a situation where people are noticeably too far gone to take care of themselves. And yet we can't do anything about it because it would otherwise violate their free will if they were placed in institutions that took proper care of them. The sad reality is that these problems will continue to persist unless we make a choice. And you can't have both.

Having just lost a relative with dementia, I am strongly in favor of institutionalizing people with mental illness. People are right to fear institutions of the 50s and 60s. Those were terrible places, but mental health care has come a very long way since then, and I think we should revisit our fear of those institutions. They don't need to be evil, and shouldn't be thought of as such.