Alright, I grew up with a father who was a psychiatrist, while that doesn't qualify me, I have gleaned a lot from talking with him while growing up. I've also spent a fair amount of time as a drug user and punker vagabond of sorts. There is a considerable difference between the people who end up on the streets because of some severe mental issues that they are genetically predisposed to, and the people who chase a high for too long neglecting responsibility and end up on heroin, meth, crack, or destroy their mind with psychedelics. Are some people coping with shit? Sure, but in a huge portion of the cases where people cause such damage to themselves where they are continually strung out to the point of being an immense burden on society, often resorting to petty crime just to get by, then I have zero fucking sympathy for those slime. Say what you want from a naive perspective, but getting fucking wasted for too long is not a mental illness, it's just irresponsible and selfish. There is vast contention over how we diagnose mental illness for two reasons: 1) because we don't have a fully formed framework for how the mind works, so it become hard to say what is "wrong" when we don't definitively know what is "right"; and 2) because of the role of insurance in modern medicine, it is necessary to ascribe some form of diagnosis to someone just in order to provide treatment, and that doesn't always reflect actual physiological conditions so much as classifications of a collection of symptoms. So, I'm not hating on people who have mental illness, but to say that being an addict is a form of mental illness is a far cry from any sort of reality, and merely an errantly perpetuated fallacy of a society that is run amok.