MICHELE STEEB-AUTHOR-02-17-26-The Vic Porcelli Show10:05 – 10:22 (17mins) Michele Steeb
CEO of Free Up Foundation
www.FreeUpFoundation.com
www.michelesteeb.com
Author of Answers Behind the RED DOOR: Battling the Homeless Epidemic
MICHELE STEEB: Tragic Tales Demand Reform
Across America’s streets, the homeless epidemic is claiming lives, fracturing
families, and eroding public safety. Often deeply intertwined with mental illness
and addiction, it has become a humanitarian crisis that traps vulnerable
individuals in cycles of dependence and despair while destabilizing the
communities around them. This crisis has been worsened by policies that elevate
the notion of “freedom” over timely, life-saving intervention.
Recent events make the consequences of that choice unmistakably clear.
Continuing on the current path is neither humane nor responsible.
Consider what unfolded in New York City over the holidays. A woman with a
documented history of serious mental illness and homelessness was released
from psychiatric care, only to purchase a knife hours later, then repeatedly stab a
mother changing her baby in a store’s restroom. Thankfully, both mother and
child survived. But we must be clear that this was not a random act of violence —
it was a foreseeable failure of a system that confuses discharge with success
and autonomy with safety.
In Honolulu, another homeless individual perished from advanced cancer that
physicians later said was treatable with timely intervention. While untreated
disease ultimately took his life, it also robbed society of the human potential that
could have been restored had policy acknowledged his inability to make informed
decisions about his own care.
The Reiner family tragedy has laid this failure bare. Two parents, Rob and
Michele Reiner, were brutally murdered in their Los Angeles home by their adult
son — a heartbreaking outcome in the context of his long struggles with
addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. Their surviving children are left
traumatized, and their family is irreparably shattered.
These are predictable results of public policy choices that
ignore anosognosia — a neurological condition common in severe mental illness
and addiction that strips individuals of insight into their own impairment.
When public policy relies on voluntary compliance alone, this version of
“freedom” becomes a slow, preventable death sentence for those least capable
of protecting themselves. The result is a system paralyzed by fear of intervention,
even as untreated illness escalates into violence, loss, and irreversible harm.
For decades, civil commitment standards have been weakened in the name of
civil liberties, requiring proof of imminent danger before action can be taken. By
the time that threshold is met, irreversible damage has often already occurred.
Meanwhile, homelessness is at the highest point ever recorded in our nation’s
history, as is the death rate amongst the homeless population, driven largely by
addiction as this JAMA study from San Francisco indicates.
Voluntary programs help some, but they leave the sickest behind, precisely
because many individuals are incapable of making rational decisions about their
own care. Housing without treatment does not heal psychosis or addiction. It
merely relocates suffering.
That is why the Trump Administration’s current push to strengthen civil
commitment laws and expand their use represents an overdue and necessary
course correction. Expanding the criteria for intervention, requiring treatment
plans with accountability, and ensuring continuity of care are acts of moral
responsibility.
Governments that turn to court-ordered treatment frameworks and supervised
care models are beginning to confront a hard truth: When individuals are too ill to
recognize their need for help, the humane response is intervention.
While the Homeless Industrial Complex insists involuntary treatment undermines
civil liberties and that it does not work, it was the abandonment of treatment-first
approaches — not their use — that coincided with an increase in homelessness,
even as public spending ballooned, all under a promise to end homelessness in
a decade.
It is a profound injustice to allow people with brain diseases to deteriorate, die, or
endanger others in the name of an autonomy they do not meaningfully possess.
Addiction and serious mental illness are diseases of the brain, not moral failings.
Ignoring them does not preserve freedom; it destroys lives, fractures families,
and imposes devastating consequences on communities and society as a whole.
Accountable compassion pairs empathy with responsibility. It invests in
psychiatric beds, recovery-oriented addiction care, and the resilience of human
beings. It recognizes that public safety and human purpose are inseparable
values.
Untreated mental illness, including improperly treated mental illness, costs the
U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually through emergency care,
incarceration, lost productivity, and community destabilization. America cannot
afford more preventable deaths on sidewalks, more assaults in public spaces, or
more families shattered by untreated disease.
Thankfully, this Administration recognizes that a society that refuses to intervene
until blood is spilled is not a free society at all.
Michele Steeb is the founder of Free Up Foundation and author of “Answers
Behind the RED DOOR: Battling the Homeless Epidemic,” based on her 13 years
as CEO of Northern California’s largest program for homeless women and
children. She is a Visiting Fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Fix Homelessness
Initiative. Follow them on Twitter: @SteebMichele and @ DiscoveryCWP.
