Homelessness And Mental Illness Quotes

Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.

Half of the time, the Holy Ghost tries to warn us about certain people that come into our life. The other half of the time he tries to tell us that the sick feeling we get in a situation is not the other person’s fault, rather it is our own hang-ups. A life filled with bias, hatred, judgment, insecurity, fear, delusion and self-righteousness can cloud the soul of anyone you meet. Our job is never to assume,instead it is to listen, communicate, ask questions then ask more, until we know the true depth of someone’s spirit.

It is not the homeless, mentally ill or extremely cunning people that we have to be afraid of. When someone loses everything that meant something to them is when people should get very afraid. A person that has nothing to lose is the scariest person on earth.

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick. ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state.

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story.

You will never know the moon or stars, unless you breathe in their solar system and inspect it from many diverse vantage points as possible.

Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of using phrases such as "housing the homeless" and "treating the mentally ill" as if we knew what counts as housing a homeless person or what it means to treat mental illness. But we do not. We have deceived ourselves that having a home and being mentally healthy are our natural conditions, and that we become homeless or mentally ill as a result of "losing" our homes or our minds. The opposite is the case. We are born without a home and without reason, and have to exert ourselves and are fortunate if we succeed in building a secure home and a sound mind.

TRACY MARANDER: [Kurt Cobain] was a really good artist. He would draw cartoons with funny sayings. I have this huge picture of this homeless guy, and it’s a satirical thing on how homeless people are mentally ill, they’re alcoholics, they had messed up childhoods — but they’re expected to fend for themselves in a box in the snow.

His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which moved him to pity, and its own particular movements which he tried hard to follow. He had learned from it how to keep his eyes down on the road, so that he could see no one, and how important it was never to look back - although there were times when memories of an earlier life filled him with grief and he lay face down upon the grass until the sweet rank odour of the earth brought him to his senses. But slowly he forgot where it was he had come from, and what it was he was escaping.

One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.

In a culture where the brain is considered the center of consciousness, an unraveling brain is an unraveling self. To let the mentally unstable live in our midst is to face the fearful fragility of the ego. So we whisper our fears over their heads, driving them into the wilderness of the streets or locking them away where they can’t be seen. We let them pale into husks of human beings, cut off from the mutual blood of society. Sometimes we toss them a coin; it’s a small price to pay for the relief of looking away.

As massive numbers of homeless, hungry, unemployed, drug-addicted, illiterate, and mentally ill people vanish behind its walls, the social problems of extreme poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, drug addiction, illiteracy, and mental illness become more ignorable, too.

It is very sad that most of us just aren’t grateful for what we have. If you’re reading this, I think it’s safe to assume that you’re not homeless. You’re not blind. You might be ill, but you’re still alive. And yet, we find it hard to be thankful. To see the gift each day brings us. It is from this lack of true gratitude that we become sad. We have told ourselves over and over that we aren’t happy. That our lives aren’t good. That we’re no good.

Cops are not trained to deal with the homeless, especially the mentally ill and the addicts. The jails are overcrowded. The criminal justice system is a nightmare to begin with, and persecuting the homeless only clogs it more. And here’s the asinine part: It costs twenty-five percent more per day to keep a person in jail than to provide shelter, food, transportation, and counseling services. These, of course, would have a long-term benefit. These, of course, would make more sense. Twenty-five percent.

Whenever I see a homeless person on the street, I think ‘That could be me in a few years time’.

Do you really think it’s all gone away? Mental illness has just moved underground, into the homeless shelters and the city parks. Out of sight, out of mind for the taxpayers. It’s a crying shame.

Reagan administration had used a study of mental health problems among homeless mothers to argue against housing subsidies—to say in effect that families were homeless because of mental illness, not a lack of housing.

It's not that we didn't love one another- we did. I just think we didn't know how to be with one another anymore. No one had prepared us for this, for what to do when tragedy breaks up your family. We had no idea what to do when disease took hold, mental illness struck, when Ma died. And we weren't prepared for what happens when proximity no longer brings you together, and instead connecting became a matter of making an effort toward one another. We were doing the best we cold with what we had.

In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder.

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.

Is our society really made safer and more just by incarcerating millions of people? Is asking the police to be the lead agency in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, school discipline, youth unemployment, immigration, youth violence, sex work, and drugs really a way to achieve a better society? Can police really be trained to perform all these tasks in a professional and uncoercive manner?

Half a decade after Frost and Gross’s “The Hoarding of Possessions,” an article in Comprehensive Psychiatry found that “the disorder belongs to a similar category of social deviance as homelessness, which does not necessarily represent mental illness.”9 In their efforts to puzzle out the phenomenon, the authors approached hoarding as less of a mental illness located in the brain and more of a socialized phenomenon located in the world-at-large—the inverse of its current reception.

The demographic of most defendants in these courts is homogeneous; society’s lost boys and girls, a sorry parade of abused children turned drug-abusing adults. Sliding on and off the bottom rung of social functioning, in and out of homelessness, joblessness and wretched worthlessness, their histories are scabbed with violence, mental ill-health and chaos, and their present lies in a parallel universe where the middle-class ambition of the Good Life is replaced with a desperate scrapping for daily survival.

But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships. A grandmother has been sheltering without a visitor for months, and a friend's business closed its doors. Doctors, nurses, and frontline workers are acting as levees, feeling each surge of the disease crash against them. My former students, now serving as pastors and chaplains, are in hospitals giving last rites in hazmat suits. They volunteer to be the last person to hold his hand. To smooth her hair. The truth if the pandemic is the truth of all suffering: that it is unjustly distributed. Who bears the brunt? The homeless and the prisoners. The elderly and the children. The sick and the uninsured. Immigrants and people needing social services. People of color and LGBTQ people. The burdens of ordinary evils— descriminations, brutality, predatory lending, illegal evictions, and medical exploitation— roll back on the vulnerable like a heavy stone. All of us struggle against the constraints places on our bodies, our commitments, our ambitions, and our resources, even as we're saddled with inflated expectations of invincibility. This is the strange cruelty of suffering in America, its insistence that everything is still possible.

A brick could be used to show you how to live a richer, fuller, more satisfying life. Don’t you want to have fulfillment and meaning saturating your existence? I can show you how you can achieve this and so much more with just a simple brick. For just $99.99—not even an even hundred bucks, I’ll send you my exclusive life philosophy that’s built around a brick. Man’s used bricks to build houses for centuries. Now let one man, me, show you how a brick can be used to build your life up bigger and stronger than you ever imagined. But act now, because supplies are limited. This amazing offer won’t last forever. You don’t want to wake up in ten years to find yourself divorced, homeless, and missing your testicles because you waited even two hours too long to obtain this information. Become a hero today—save your life. Procrastination is only for the painful things in life. We prolong the boring, but why put off for tomorrow the exciting life you could be living today? If you’re not satisfied with the information I’m providing, I’m willing to offer you a no money back guarantee. That’s right, you read that wrong. If you are not 100% dissatisfied with my product, I’ll give you your money back. For $99.99 I’m offering 99.99%, but you’ve got to be willing to penny up that percentage to 100. Why delay? The life you really want is mine, and I’m willing to give it to you—for a price. That price is a one-time fee of $99.99, which of course everyone can afford—even if they can’t afford it. Homeless people can’t afford it, but they’re the people who need my product the most. Buy my product, or face the fact that in all probability you are going to end up homeless and sexless and unloved and filthy and stinky and probably even disabled, if not physically than certainly mentally. I don’t care if your testicles taste like peanut butter—if you don’t buy my product, even a dog won’t lick your balls you miserable cur. I curse you! God damn it, what are you, slow? Pay me my money so I can show you the path to true wealth. Don’t you want to be rich? Everything takes money—your marriage, your mortgage, and even prostitutes. I can show you the path to prostitution—and it starts by ignoring my pleas to help you. I’m not the bad guy here. I just want to help. You have some serious trust issues, my friend. I have the chance to earn your trust, and all it’s going to cost you is a measly $99.99. Would it help you to trust me if I told you that I trust you? Well, I do. Sure, I trust you. I trust you to make the smart decision for your life and order my product today. Don’t sleep on this decision, because you’ll only wake up in eight hours to find yourself living in a miserable future. And the future indeed looks bleak, my friend. War, famine, children forced to pimp out their parents just to feed the dog. Is this the kind of tomorrow you’d like to live in today? I can show you how to provide enough dog food to feed your grandpa for decades. In the future I’m offering you, your wife isn’t a whore that you sell for a knife swipe of peanut butter because you’re so hungry you actually considered eating your children. Become a hero—and save your kids’ lives. Your wife doesn’t want to spread her legs for strangers. Or maybe she does, and that was a bad example. Still, the principle stands. But you won’t be standing—in the future. Remember, you’ll be confined to a wheelchair. Mushrooms are for pizzas, not clouds, but without me, your life will atom bomb into oblivion. Nobody’s dropping a bomb while I’m around. The only thing I’m dropping is the price. Boom! I just lowered the price for you, just to show you that you are a valued customer. As a VIP, your new price on my product is just $99.96. That’s a savings of over two pennies (three, to be precise). And I’ll even throw in a jar of peanut butter for free. That’s a value of over $.99. But wait, there’s more! If you call within the next ten minutes, I’ll even throw in a blanket free of charge. . .

whose experiences are primarily those of suffering and marginalization—those in whom we can hear the echoes and see the image of original Israel and the Lamanites. Those who are despised, and rejected, and scattered. Those who are deemed by some as filthy. Refugees and displaced persons. Immigrants. The poor. The homeless. Racial minorities. Those who suffer from disabilities or mental illness. Victims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. That’s where God’s particular work of restoration will happen today, as part of the general restoration of all his people.

Interestingly, a point that never emerged in the press but that Tim Donovan revealed to the police was that Annie had specifically "asked him to trust her" for that night's doss money. This "he declined to do." Had this incident become common knowledge, it's likely that Donovan would have faced an even worse public backlash for his role in Annie's demise. "You can find money for your beer, and you can't find money for your bed." the deputy keeper is said to have spoken in response to her request. Annie, not quite willing to admit defeat, or perhaps in a show of pride, responded with a sigh: "Keep my bed for me. I shan't be long." Ill and drunk, she went downstairs and "stood in the door for two or three minutes," considering her options. Like the impecunious lodger described by Goldsmith, she too would have been contemplating from whom among her "pals" it might have been "possible to borrow the halfpence necessary to complete {her} doss money." More likely, Annie was mentally preparing "to spend the night with only the sky for a canopy." She then set off down Brushfield Street, toward Christ Church, Spitalfields, where the homeless regularly bedded down. Her thoughts as she stepped out onto Dorest Street, as the light from Crossingham's dimmed at her back, can never be known. What route she wove through the black streets and to whom she spoke along the will never be confirmed. All that is certain is her final destination. Of the many tragedies that befell Annie Chapman in the final years of her life, perhaps one of the most poignant was that she needn't have been on the streets on that night, or on any other. Ill and feverish, she needn't have searched the squalid corners for a spot to sleep. Instead, she might have lain in a bed in her mother's house or in her sisters' care, on the other side of London. She might have been treated for tuberculosis; she might have been comforted by the embraces of her children or the loving assurances of her family. Annie needn't have suffered. At every turn there had been a hand reaching to pull her from the abyss, but the counter-tug of addiction was more forceful, and the grip of shame was just as strong. It was this that pulled her under, that had extinguished her hope and then her life many years earlier. What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what drink had left behind.

As with all social service projects, a lexicon of terms accumulated around the Housing First movement. Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) described the movement’s general aim and means, and a model program conducted in the 1990s in New York had shown that housing for chronically homeless people could indeed be long-lasting and beneficial, provided they received adequate support. This trial—The Consumer Preference Supported Housing Model (CPSH)—had involved 242 people who suffered from either mental illness or substance abuse or both. The model had housed them, via various grants and public subsidies, in apartments situated in “affordable locations throughout the city’s low-income neighborhoods.” And they had been supported by Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams, somewhat modified from the general prototype, but substantial. These included nurses, social workers, drug counselors, administrative assistants, and “peer counselors,” who directed the support services with the advice and consent of the tenants. Each team had access to psychiatrists and other professionals, and each stood ready to help the tenants every night and day of the week. After five years, 88 percent remained housed—a remarkable result.

A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness. But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; the grossly inadequate provisions that had been made for mentally ill people since the nation began to close its psychiatric hospitals; the decline in jobs and wages for unskilled workers; the continuation of racist housing policies such as redlining and racially disproportionate evictions; the AIDS epidemic and the drug epidemics that fed it. Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability—a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn’t need it.

Cesca sipped from her coffee cup as she peered through the windshield into the darkness. Rain was falling hard on a San Francisco she didn’t recognize from her own universe, or from her time in the other Matt’s universe. The real darkness here had nothing to do with night. This San Francisco mirrored the moral corruption and decay of the society which inhabited it. She and Ariel had been here two days, scouring streets filled with perversion and hopelessness; alleyways inhabited by the homeless and mentally ill; sex shops catering to every perversion imaginable and unimaginable; sidewalks teeming with drug addicts and male prostitutes — some dressed as women; street corners inhabited by once lovely young women prematurely aging from selling their bodies to all takers — male and female; children of both sexes, from as young as seven and eight, dressed by pimps to attract pedophiles who cruised this part of the city nightly. Many of the children would be sold on the spot, never to be seen again. Sun-faded and now graffitied wall mosaics of galvanizing yet transient political cult personalities, erected by their blinded followers centuries ago, marked this alternate world’s gradual slide into an ethical, and finally moral abyss, from which it had never crawled out. "God, I can’t believe this is San Francisco,” whispered Ariel from the seat next to Cesca. “I feel like I need to run a bar of soap over my soul.

In any community, there is a tension between a task-oriented culture and a relational (or covenantal) culture. Both are integral to a healthy community. Tasks need the organizational structures of committees, agendas, and regulated, efficient actions. And actions, committees, and structures need to be grounded in, and responsive to, dynamic covenant relationships that are always in process. Most communities, however, have an overwhelming tendency to focus on tasks and structures, and the churches I have served are no exception to this rule. The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, for example, is awash in tasks, such as serving the homeless and the mentally ill, tutoring inner-city teenagers, and tending to our members. We expend an enormous amount of energy engaging these tasks. In fact, tasks consume most of our time and energy. Thus, relationship building is not easy because it is most often done in and around our activities (our tasks). All of this is to say that relation building, if it is to be foundational to communal life, must be intentional and focused, for tasks can be all-consuming.

Almost no one—not even the police officers who deal with it every day, not even most psychiatrists—publicly connects marijuana and crime. We all know alcohol causes violence, but somehow, we have grown to believe that marijuana does not, that centuries of experience were a myth. As a pediatrician wrote in a 2015 piece for the New York Times in which he argued that marijuana was safer for his teenage children than alcohol: “People who are high are not committing violence.” But they are. Almost unnoticed, the studies have piled up. On murderers in Pittsburgh, on psychiatric patients in Italy, on tourists in Spain, on emergency room patients in Michigan. Most weren’t even designed to look for a connection between marijuana and violence, because no one thought one existed. Yet they found it. In many cases, they have even found marijuana’s tendency to cause violence is greater than that of alcohol. A 2018 study of people with psychosis in Switzerland found that almost half of cannabis users became violent over a three-year period; their risk of violence was four times that of psychotic people who didn’t use. (Alcohol didn’t seem to increase violence in this group at all.) The effect is not confined to people with preexisting psychosis. A 2012 study of 12,000 high school students across the United States showed that those who used cannabis were more than three times as likely to become violent as those who didn’t, surpassing the risk of alcohol use. Even worse, studies of children who have died from abuse and neglect consistently show that the adults responsible for their deaths use marijuana far more frequently than alcohol or other drugs—and far, far more than the general population. Marijuana does not necessarily cause all those crimes, but the link is striking and large. We shouldn’t be surprised. The violence that drinking causes is largely predictable. Alcohol intoxicates. It disinhibits users. It escalates conflict. It turns arguments into fights, fights into assaults, assaults into murders. Marijuana is an intoxicant that can disinhibit users, too. And though it sends many people into a relaxed haze, it also frequently causes paranoia and psychosis. Sometimes those are short-term episodes in healthy people. Sometimes they are months-long spirals in people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. And paranoia and psychosis cause violence. The psychiatrists who treated Raina Thaiday spoke of the terror she suffered, and they weren’t exaggerating. Imagine voices no one else can hear screaming at you. Imagine fearing your food is poisoned or aliens have put a chip in your brain. When that terror becomes too much, some people with psychosis snap. But when they break, they don’t escalate in predictable ways. They take hammers to their families. They decide their friends are devils and shoot them. They push strangers in front of trains. The homeless man mumbling about God frightens us because we don’t have to be experts on mental illness and violence to know instinctively that untreated psychosis is dangerous. And finding violence and homicides connected to marijuana is all too easy.

Like you, I know people who drink, people who do drugs, and bosses who have tantrums and treat their subordinates like dirt. They all have good jobs. Were they to become homeless, some of them would surely also become 'alcoholics,' 'addicts,' or 'mentally ill.

In the light of Christianity’s absolute law of charity, we came to see what formerly we could not: the autistic or Down syndrome or otherwise disabled child, for instance, for whom the world can remain a perpetual perplexity, which can too often cause pain but perhaps only vaguely and fleetingly charm or delight; the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. To reject, turn away from, or kill any or all of them would be, in a very real sense, the most purely practical of impulses. To be able, however, to see in them not only something of worth but indeed something potentially godlike, to be cherished and adored, is the rarest and most ennoblingly unrealistic capacity ever bred within human souls. To look on the child whom our ancient ancestors would have seen as somehow unwholesome or as a worthless burden, and would have abandoned to fate, and to see in him or her instead a person worthy of all affection—resplendent with divine glory, ominous with an absolute demand upon our consciences, evoking our love and our reverence—is to be set free from mere elemental existence, and from those natural limitations that pre-Christian persons took to be the very definition of reality. And only someone profoundly ignorant of history and of native human inclinations could doubt that it is only as a consequence of the revolutionary force of Christianity within our history, within the very heart of our shared nature, that any of us can experience this freedom.

There is a dark subtext to this message that seldom finds direct expression. Those who suffer most directly the effects of social problems—the poor, the homeless, abused children, the frail aged, and the chronically mentally ill—often have the fewest personal resources at their disposal to allow them, in the words of the psychotherapeutic ego psychologists, to “adapt” by finding a “better environment.” For these people, the self-esteem message either falls on deaf ears (if they have some perspective on the social forces contributing to their plight), or it contributes to the generally false hope that merely a change of mind will lift them out of their problems. This false hope harkens back to the promises of magic, religion, faith healing, and the power of positive thinking. It also contributes to the lack of faith in collective approaches to problem solving. Those who do not suffer as directly from social ills (generally middle- and upper-class whites) receive a different message from the self-esteemers. They are told that it is not only acceptable but a sign of good emotional health for them to be preoccupied with matters of self-perfection. Furthermore, the idea that all difficulties originate within the individual helps to mitigate any feelings of guilt or even concern that the more fortunate might have regarding their responsibility to do anything about social problems: “It’s not my problem!

Most voters in 2021 still felt homelessness was the number one problem that required addressing. In January 2021, most respondents agreed that violent crime was increasing (52 percent) and that we need more housing, not less, to reduce rents and eviction (83 percent). Forty-three percent said mental illness and drug addiction were the main causes of homelessness, and 49 percent agreed with the statement, “We need to break up the open-air drug markets and offer mandatory drug treatment as an alternative to jail.” Eighty-eight percent of Democrats and 29 percent of Republicans agreed.

And so, on an Easter Sunday, while many kids were dyeing eggs and eating chocolate, I took my two-year-old daughter on a pigeon expedition. When I had told my plan to my wife, Beth, she blanched. Where exactly, she wanted to know, did I plan on going? “Will you please be sure to keep our daughter away from human feces and needles?” she asked. It was a reasonable request: Pigeons prefer dense urban settings, and they congregate in open spaces. It’s exactly the same environment favored by the mentally ill, drug addicts, and homeless people.

Psychiatrists have long warned against giving money to the mentally ill homeless addicted to drugs, and yet that is what San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other progressive cities do. “It is not only clinically incorrect,” said the director of psychiatric services at San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, “but almost sadistic to give money on a regular basis to people who have a demonstrated inability to handle cash funds.

Traffickers, meanwhile, had discovered a way to make methamphetamine in harrowing new amounts. While I was on the road, their meth reached all corners of the country and became the fourth stage of the drug-addiction crisis. Opiate addicts began to switch to meth, or use both together. This made no sense in the traditional drug world. One was a depressant, the other a stimulant. But it was as if their brains were primed for any drug. This stage did not involve mass deaths. Rather, the new meth gnawed at brains in frightening ways. Suddenly users displayed symptoms of schizophrenia—paranoia, hallucinations. The spread of this meth provoked homelessness across the country. Homeless encampments of meth users appeared in rural towns—“They’re almost like villages,” one Indiana counselor said. In the West, large tent encampments formed, populated by people made frantic by unseen demons in Skid Row in Los Angeles, Sunnyslope in Phoenix, the tunnels in Las Vegas. This methamphetamine, meanwhile, prompted strange obsessions—with bicycles, with flashlights, and with hoarding junk. In each of these places, it seemed mental illness was the problem. It was, but so much of it was induced by the new meth.

For several months, about all I did was talk to addicts, counselors, and cops around the country—over the phone because the pandemic restricted travel. Meth was overshadowed by the opioid epidemic. But the people I spoke to told me stories nearly identical to Eric’s. This new meth itself was quickly, intensely damaging people’s brains. The symptoms were always the same—violent paranoia, hallucinations, figures always lurking in the shadows, isolation, rotted and abscessed dental work, uncontrollable limbs, massive memory loss, jumbled speech, and, almost always, homelessness. It was creating a swath of people nationwide who, while on meth and for a good period afterward, were mentally ill and all but untreatable by usual methods of drug rehabilitation. Ephedrine-made meth wasn’t good for the brain, but it was nothing like this. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are afflictions that begin in the young. Now people in their thirties and forties were going mad. The new meth was also deadly in a way ephedrine meth was not. It was killing young people with congestive heart failure, a disease common to people over sixty-five.

Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.”46 Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments.47 “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.”48

problem with Housing First stems from the fact that it doesn’t require that people address their mental illness and substance abuse, which are often the underlying causes of homelessness.

The Princess was anxious that her sons should also see something of the real world beyond boarding schools and palaces. As she said in a speech on Aids: ‘I am only too aware of the temptation of avoiding harsh reality; not just for myself but for my own children too. Am I doing them a favour if I hide suffering and unpleasantness from them until the last possible minute? The last minutes which I choose for them may be too late. I can only face them with a choice based on what I know. The rest is up to them.’ She felt this was especially important for William, the future King. As she once said: ‘Through learning what I do, and his father to a certain extent, he has got an insight into what’s coming his way. He’s not hidden upstairs with the governess.’ Over the years she has taken both boys on visits to hostels for the homeless and to see seriously ill people in hospital. When she took William on a secret visit to the Passage day centre for the homeless in Central London, accompanied by Cardinal Basil Hume, her pride was evident as she introduced him to what many would consider the flotsam and jetsam of society. ‘He loves it and that really rattles people,’ she proudly told friends. The Catholic Primate of All England was equally effusive. ‘What an extraordinary child,’ he told her. ‘He has such dignity at such a young age.’ This upbringing helped William cope when a group of mentally handicapped children joined fellow school pupils for a Christmas party. Diana watched with delight as the future King gallantly helped these deprived youngsters join in the fun. ‘I was so thrilled and proud. A lot of adults couldn’t handle it,’ she told friends. Again during one Ascot week, a time of Champagne, smoked salmon and fashionable frivolity for High society, the Princess took her boys to the Refuge night shelter for down-and-outs. William played chess while Harry joined in a card school. Two hours later the boys were on their way back to Kensington Palace, a little older and a little wiser. ‘They have a knowledge,’ she once said. ‘They may never use it, but the seed is there, and I hope it will grow because knowledge is power. I want them to have an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress and people’s hopes and dreams.’ Her quiet endeavors gradually won back many of the doubters who had come to see her as a threat to the monarchy, or as a talentless and embittered woman seeking to make trouble, especially by upstaging or embarrassing her husband and his family. The sight of the woman who was still then technically the future Queen, unadorned and virtually unaccompanied, mixing with society’s poorest and most distressed or most threatened, confounded many of her critics.

Cities have filled up with the homeless!

I have been watching the Democrats run the USA for four years. The police are still corrupt and incompetent, their ‘green’ energy policy is toxic, workplace health and safety enforcement through OSHA is a ‘ghost’, Boeing is a global embarrassment, millions of people are being denied their eligible disability benefits through feeble excuses, mental illness is a national crisis, cities have filled up with the homeless, housing is out of reach to the masses, rents have gone astronomical, their proxy wars have us on the edge of the next nuclear disaster, their unemployment numbers are fraudulent because they do not count the long term unemployed or the disabled, unemployment benefits are cut off to the long term unemployed, illegal immigration went crazy during their term, and so on. I will be using my 2024 USA vote for positive change and that will not be coming from another four years of the Democrats.

More than a quarter of the nation’s 559,000 homeless have a serious mental illness. Their average life span is ten to twenty years shorter than the general population.

I never woke up one day and said, “Hey I want to lead a tragic life.” My journey with mental health challenges and addiction have led me to lose everything in my life more than a couple of times — my jobs, my housing, my books and files, and my self-respect.

There might be a witch hunt of every person with a mental illness. It would be easy to make the homeless schizophrenic community disappear. No one would notice they were gone. And then the people who talk to themselves. The poor bastards who are bipolar. Everyone with severe behavioral problems.

homeless woman who rejected care for two and a half years by screaming at the outreach team when they approached was finally committed for involuntary treatment when she became threatening. Three years later, O’Connell saw her at a board meeting of a nonprofit organization. Finding her totally transformed, O’Connell remarked, “You look fabulous.” Her response, “Screw you. You left me out there for all those years and didn’t help.

A homeless woman who rejected care for two and a half years by screaming at the outreach team when they approached was finally committed for involuntary treatment when she became threatening. Three years later, O’Connell saw her at a board meeting of a nonprofit organization. Finding her totally transformed, O’Connell remarked, “You look fabulous.” Her response, “Screw you. You left me out there for all those years and didn’t help.

I’m also very aware that still, today, that is not the case for many people; that I am very privileged, and that my privilege had a huge part in my recovery. Everything from degree of severity, to social status, race, level of financial stability, and ability to seek health care has an impact on not only how mental illness is treated, but how it is perceived. We view a depressed upper-class woman from a stable family background dealing with depression as “having the blues,” while the homeless woman on the street corner battling auditory hallucinations is a thing to be feared, a threatening monster. Not a person in need of help. Not someone with thoughts, dreams, fears, and needs of their own. Not a fully formed human being with agency and identity, suffering from an illness and doing their best to function as well as they can.

In the light of Christianity’s absolute law of charity, we came to see what formerly we could not: the autistic or Down syndrome or otherwise disabled child, for instance, for whom the world can remain a perpetual perplexity, which can too often cause pain but perhaps only vaguely and fleetingly charm or delight; the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. To reject, turn away from, or kill any or all of them would be, in a very real sense, the most purely practical of impulses. To be able, however, to see in them not only something of worth but indeed something potentially godlike, to be cherished and adored, is the rarest and most ennoblingly unrealistic capacity ever bred within human souls. To look on the child whom our ancient ancestors would have seen as somehow unwholesome or as a worthless burden, and would have abandoned to fate, and to see in him or her instead a person worthy of all affection—resplendent with divine glory, ominous with an absolute demand upon our consciences, evoking our love and our reverence—is to be set free from mere elemental existence, and from those natural limitations that pre-Christian persons took to be the very definition of reality. And only someone profoundly ignorant of history and of native human inclinations could doubt that it is only as a consequence of the revolutionary force of Christianity within our history, within the very heart of our shared nature, that any of us can experience this freedom. We deceive ourselves also, however, if we doubt how very fragile this vision of things truly is: how elusive this truth that only charity can know, how easily forgotten this mystery that only charity can penetrate.

It was a reasonable request: Pigeons prefer dense urban settings, and they congregate in open spaces. It’s exactly the same environment favored by the mentally ill, drug addicts, and homeless people. I suspect that some of the disgust we feel for pigeons is associative. We’ve grafted our feelings about human outcasts onto these birds because they share the same spaces and hang around waiting for handouts. Perhaps we’d feel differently about pigeons if we were better at dealing with our own species.

We could talk about the diathesis-stress model of psychopathology, the well-accepted notion that individuals may carry genes that predispose them to a mental illness such as schizophrenia, but the illness lies dormant unless a traumatic stressor (such as sexual abuse, homelessness, and of course, imprisonment) arouses it.4

Furthermore, we automatically deduce that people who don’t conform must be mentally ill. The homeless man who refuses to live as normal folk do is suffering some psychiatric malady. But imagine for instance a world of anarchy where law and order has broken down. In that world the mentally ill would be considered normal. Thus it can be assumed that mental illness is a derivative of an economic functioning world. “The fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.” - Erich Fromm.

As years passed and the tide turned against funding public hospitals, the mentally ill were left to wander the streets. With the decline of the reform movement and funds being cut for affordable housing, the mentally ill were joined in the streets by families, often headed by a single mother. The end result was the presence of homeless individuals and families we see wandering the streets today.

He did not believe that the one thousand deaths caused each year by people with unmedicated schizophrenia should indict the vast population of those suffering from the illness, but he did want to prevent those deaths, a greater number of suicides, a growing number of mentally ill homeless people, and a prison population swelled by people suffering from mental illness who received no care.

Stop,’ said Greta. ‘Stop with the will-to-live shit. It’s for the terminally ill, okay? The wrongly convicted, the chronically homeless - people living on the edge. It’s meaningless nonsense coming from you. What you and Luke have is confidence, that’s all, along with the expectation that things will go your way because they probably will, because they already have.

As the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has identified, people with anosognosia are at a heightened risk for homelessness and arrest.9 Without awareness of their mental illness and an understanding of how to live with it, people are unable to regulate their behavior or the expectations of social settings, including programs intending to help. But much of the problem is also systemic: our social safety nets meant to serve those with severe mental illness are often designed in ways that render them functionally inaccessible.

In this sense, we can all start with this question for ourselves and our local church communities: Are we safe for people with mental health struggles? Do our relationships and programs provide low-barrier and consistent care for people? If your church has a program for unhoused folks, do you expel or ban people who exhibit erratic behavior? Knowing that these behaviors may not be willful, how can your program adjust to offer safety for all while also including those who require greater care and intention? If your programs are frequented by people with mental illness, are there any partnerships you can form with local nonprofits that work with this population? Is your Sunday service a place that would welcome and hold space for someone with unregulated mental illness? If not, what would need to change?

I have often felt the disciples’ dismay when it comes to people with particularly acute mental illness; I feel lost and out of my depth.

To walk away from such a primal appeal for help would have left me with such guilt wrenched sleeplessness, that answering her plea was the better choice, regardless of my personal needs. That began the slow erosion of personal boundaries when doing this work.

There is now scientific research that proves that gardening promotes well-being in people experiencing depression or distress, including those who are elderly, homeless, or mentally ill. Indeed, putting one’s hands in the soil, feeling the texture of plants, smelling their scents, and looking at their calming colors can relax the mind and uplift the spirits.

Even if the law is enforced equitably and without bias or malice, it still results in the incarceration of large numbers of people who are homeless, mentally ill, and poor, rather than hardened predators. Ultimately, the criminalization of homeless people should be understood as a way of managing growing inequality through increasingly punitive mechanisms of state control.

Americans liked to say the Chinese were like that as if brutality was a cultural characteristic instead of a characteristic of the destitute; people who have to fight for every morsel, drop, bite, breath. People did such things everywhere, not just in the third world. It was happening in America, where poverty wasn’t an excuse. Teenagers set fire to homeless people, soldiers raped their subordinates, guards let prisoners out of their cells to kill other prisoners, police shot the mentally ill. It wouldn’t be long before they were eating their Labradoodles and throwing their unwanted children off the Bay Bridge. Yes, Americans should mind their own business, clean their own house.

Nutrition is an important part of our overall health, of course, but also for our mental health. Homeless people are among the largest groups known to have high concentrations of mentally ill individuals. See the connection?” -Shenita Etwaroo

Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century. Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done.

Given the opportunity, I love to take time to regret how long it took me to become a “serious writer.” I regret allowing myself to get heavy in college. I regret being financially irresponsible and unable to buy a house before Portland’s housing boom began, back when I could’ve gotten a $500,000 house for $150,000. I regret not flossing. I regret the tax debt I incurred when I was freelancing. I regret the years I lost to heartbreak. I regret the bilevel haircut I got when I was a sophomore in high school. I usually finish it all off by imagining what it’ll be like to die homeless and alone because of my mental illness and all the financial and personal mistakes I’ve made. That sort of thing. That’s why I take my phone to bed with me.

Pigeons prefer dense urban settings, and they congregate in open spaces. It’s exactly the same environment favored by the mentally ill, drug addicts, and homeless people. I suspect that some of the disgust we feel for pigeons is associative. We’ve grafted our feelings about human outcasts onto these birds because they share the same spaces and hang around waiting for handouts. Perhaps we’d feel differently about pigeons if we were better at dealing with our own species.

By the early 1800s, these prison/asylums in western Europe were, therefore, populated mostly by criminals, drunkards, heretics and the blasphemous, the unemployed, the homeless, and the physically handicapped, but only occasionally by the people we today would think of as having mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities. The only thing the residents had in common was that they didn’t work.

Whenever I see a homeless person on the street, I think ‘That could me me in a few years time’.

The conditions promoting the upsurge in the US were multiple: the concurrent epidemic of HIV/AIDS, immigration from countries with a high prevalence of tuberculosis, the spread of drug resistance, and the lack of patient adherence to the standard treatment regimen, especially among people who were homeless, mentally ill, or impoverished. Most important, however, was the decision to dismantle the tuberculosis campaign as a result of the confident assumption that antibiotics would eliminate the disease.

Schizophrenia and its ilk are not seen by society as conditions that coexist with the potential for being high-functioning, and are therefore terrifying. No one wants to be crazy, least of all truly crazy—as in psychotic. Schizophrenics are seen as some of the most dysfunctional members of society: we are homeless, we are inscrutable, and we are murderers. The only times I see schizophrenia mentioned in the news are in the context of violence, as in Newsweek’s June 2015 opinion piece titled “Charleston Massacre: Mental Illness Common Thread for Mass Shootings.