I just need to get it out right now. It's my depressing, agitating obsession for today.

I was homeless for about a month. Well, I'm not sure "homeless" is exactly appropriate, because I met plenty of people who were homeless, but for them, they had no way out, whereas once my episode started to wind down, I was able to plead for help and eventually be shipped off to relatives. So I don't always feel comfortable saying that I was "homeless" outside of technically speaking. But I did live on the streets for about a month. I slept outside, was harassed by police officers, saw a lot of crazy ****, was assaulted twice, and met some very wonderful people.

The vast majority of those wonderful people were mentally ill. A good portion of them had tried to self-medicate and had wound up with crippling drug addictions or retardation effects from severe alcohol abuse, so that it was to the point where it was hard to see the mental illness behind the addiction. But as I spent more time with them as the days passed, heard their stories and observed them closely, it was clear that the mental illness was there.

I encountered a woman who was suffering from severe psychosis, likely schizophrenia. She hallucinated that bugs were crawling out of her skin. Other homeless people would try to calm her down when she was getting really upset and loud at night, because they didn't want any trouble from sinister or unstable types lurking around, nor did they want the police to get called by housed people, because then she would be taken to jail. That's what happened, by the way. The mentally ill would be taken to jail, processed, spend the night and be put back out on the streets the next day. I was once able to convince her that I was a doctor and that I had medicine that would kill the bugs. It was an Aspirin but at least for a little while she seemed consoled.

I spent most of the nights out there sleeping on the sidewalks in Venice, California, or in a water treatment plant in Santa Monica. Everywhere I looked were mentally ill people living in on the streets. There was even an older couple, looked to be in their 60s, who had their own cardboard spot at the end of one of the streets. Every morning before the sun was up, the cops would drive down the street slowly and yell at us to get up, show ourselves if we were under things or in tents, to clear out. It was considered a 'phew' moment if nobody freaked out, since a lot of people had severe paranoia and agitation problems.

I encountered several people who had obvious delusions going on, some had obvious hallucination problems. I think pretty much everyone had some form of trauma just from living on the streets, but I'm sure plenty had PTSD prior to it, too. There was one man who had flashbacks sometimes and would try to fight people if they got too close to him, he was mostly incoherent but it was easy to tell that he thought we were some sort of combatant enemies trying to get him. For a while my little tent was next to a woman's who had severe depression, not just from her situation but to the point that her self-care was very bad, so she may have had other things, as well. I cleaned out her area once while she was gone for the day because she had maggots among her things and just slept in it without caring. Sometimes when we would talk at night she would stop making sense and do that half-crying, half-laughing thing, as though she was cracking up and far away. Another woman (she was there with her husband) was a motherly sweetheart type. She lost her kids to CPS because she was unable to care for them, and when she had episodes it became apparent as to why. She would go from being sweet and motherly to being a paranoid rager, but she wouldn't make any sense so it was hard to figure out how to calm her down, since it was hard to figure out what specifically she was freaking out about. I met a young guy, 18 or 19 at most, who thought that God was guiding him on a mission, but the more he explained the more obvious it was that it wasn't a spiritual thing, it was a psychotic delusion thing.

I could really go on and on about all the people I met or just observed.

But these are the people who fall through the cracks. They are the true face of mental illness. What happens when a mentally ill person doesn't get any help, doesn't have anyone to help them get disability and/or treatment. What happens when a person is too ill or too poor to get treatment or apply for disability and has nobody in their life to walk them through it.

And these people are invisible. I watched wealthier sorts (tons in the areas north of Los Angeles) literally step over and around homeless people without looking at them, as though they were just bags of trash. Sometimes housed people would call the cops to complain about homeless people in a park, and the cops would come out to intimidate and shoo us away as though we were a bunch of raccoons. We were not considered to be human. It was extremely rare for anyone to actually look at us. We were invisible.

Which also says to me that mental illness is invisible. It's easy to give someone on disability a bunch of ****, or someone on medication a lecture about how it's all in their head, and so on. It's easy because the face of mental illness is hidden and managed thanks to disability, thanks to medications and often thanks to a lot of exhausting effort on the part of the mentally ill.

But it seems that nobody wants to talk about the mentally ill on the streets. Then it becomes all too real and horrifying. Then suddenly you know what the mentally ill person in your life is really dealing with, underneath disability, medication, silence, secrets and whatever else covers it up and makes them seem "okay enough".

But these people on the streets were no different from me. I was just lucky, I was able to be shipped off to some relatives. But other than that they were no different. They struggled with depression, mania, dysphoria, hallucinations, delusions, self-medicating, paranoia, etc. Many of them were smart, most of them were good people. But they were mentally ill. They needed help, and they didn't get help, so they wound up on the streets getting screamed at by cops at 5AM to get their butts up off the cold, hard cement or else.

And just like the ignorant and nasty attitudes lobbed at many people struggling with mental illness, I've heard it all when it comes to the homeless. How they just need to quit being lazy and get jobs. Sure is a walk in the park to get a job when you have no address, no phone, no clean clothes, a huge employment gap and a nice trauma/mental illness cocktail going for ya. Oh and if you ever got arrested and got yourself a criminal record because you were busted daring to fall asleep in public - or maybe went psychotic because there was nowhere for you to sleep - that helps you get a job even more, mhmm.

It's all the same. So it doesn't really surprise me that mental illness is patronized and trivialized and largely ignored. Because without any support of any kind, the mentally ill wind up on the streets, and people on the streets are invisible. The true face of mental illness is invisible.