Tangent On Ignorance

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.

Very true. Well said.

Yup. I was homeless for a long tim, I was lucky. Most of the time I was at shelters but one shelter wanted me to go to a mental health clinic and they wanted me to attend groups. But the two groups they had were not for me, one was for low functioning people the other other for those with addiction problems. When I refused and went back to the shelter they called the cops, I was paranoid at the time so I tried to escape the cops, was hog tied thrown into a police car and carted off to the worse place I had ever been in. It was an observation place in the basement of a hospital, you had to go though several locked doors to get in, just like a jail where the so called nursing staff basically hung out behind plastic windows and ignored everyone. there were no beds just chairs. The bathroom was filthy and it was freezing cold. After about 24 hours They decided I didn't need to be hospitalized and let me out in the middle of the night with no way to get back to the shelter where my stuff was, which wouldn't have let me in that late anyway. When I returned to the shelter they told me I had to leave. So much for a Christian run shelter! That hospital place was only there for the homeless people they wouldn't ever dare treat anyone else that way and they didn't help beyond doping people up with heavy meds and sending on their way back to the streets.

Nope nobody ever looks at you, there's no bathrooms and no place to clean up and some of the people I met were the nicest people I've ever met. There was a free clinic for the homeless in one city, they were the greatest bunch of doctors and nurses I've ever met, they cared a lot about every person that came though the door. They helped me get back on medication and into a good shelter that has SW that helped me get a place to stay. It was possible for me cause I was on SSDI already and had a source of income, but so many people didn't have that and had no way to get the paperwork they needed to get SSI or any other help and and there's so few places that even see the homeless as people who wants to be degraded by asking for help?

Thank god for section 8, without that I'd never be able to afford an apartment. Getting a place to stay was the single greatest factor in achieving stability. They( the system) knows this but very little progress ever happens because of all the roadblocks, the most basic being ID papers and birth records. That and there's too many rules, I knew people who would rather be on the streets than be told they had to do x, y and z to have a place to live. Then there's the places( halfway houses) that are just there to rip off the system and get money for a cot in a room with several people in it.

I just wanted to say thank you for writing this. This is really important stuff. It is frightening to think I am one step away from being homeless at all times. We are more marginalized than any group in this country for sure. I hope one day it will change and that I live to see it happen.

Thank you, CopperStar & sidestepper, for what you've written here. There are initiatives in a fair number of cities in the US for "housing first" for homeless people. I have come to believe that housing itself qualifies as treatment for people with mental illness. Being homeless is hugely stressful and often dangerous.

This is so true and so sad, the way we treat the homeless and mentally ill on the streets. I'm in Canada, but it's the same here. It's so sad that we can't look people in the eye. So degrading. I pray it changes sooner rather than later.

I was just honestly stunned that so many homeless people were mentally ill. I'm sure that not all of them were, but it seemed that the vast majority of them were. From one story to the next, it could almost always be traced back to mental illness.

1. Their mental illness lead them to being unable to care for themselves and maintain employment, and also prevented them from being able to seek out medication and/or being able to seek out government assistance.

2. Their mental illness lead them to attempting to self-medicate, and the resulting addiction wound up being the straw that broke the camel's back.

3. Their mental illness issues ran in their blood, and their caregiver(s) had also been mentally ill and thus unable to help or provide the support they needed.

4. Their mental illness was met with scorn and ignorance by their relatives, so they did not receive support and compassion, only shunning and abandonment.

5. Their mental illness made them too fearful towards people and groups that could have helped, and those people/groups gave up on them almost immediately without trying to work with the issue of paranoia.

6. Their mental illness was ignored or downplayed by professionals until they reached critical mass, and then nobody was under any obligation to help them.

7. Their mental illness had been covert until they hit a major life crisis, such as being laid off or losing a loved one, and their life spiraled out of control while everyone assumed they would be "okay" and handle it like a mentally healthy person.

And just on and on. I would say with some conviction that the vast majority of homelessness (not all, but the vast majority) has ignored and untreated mental illness as its core cause.

I feel strongly that the prevailing ignorance and selfish scorn towards the mentally illness and the homeless is extremely similar for a reason, because the two are very deeply connected.

What would bring the severest to the shelters? I know here it's illegal to feed the homeless. Just city run bath houses and a place to pickup mail would help.

The studies I've read indicate that it's important for professionals seeking to work on the problem to actually have the balls to go out into the streets and interact in a non-pushy, non-demanding way with the homeless. It takes time to build up trust. In one study, workers would go out on a schedule and try to build trust with the homeless, often offering fresh, clean socks as a token of benevolence. The goal was to not come across as trying to control the homeless, or treat them as a 'problem' - but rather to treat them as sovereign human beings with complex emotions. The results were usually very positive and effective compared to simply waiting for the homeless to come seeking out shelters and programs. Especially because many homeless are too ill to be able to go about doing that themselves. So first trust would be established and relationship foundations built, and then the workers would offer to help the homeless get to a shelter or program and guide them through the process. I was very impressed with the work those people did and the results they were reportedly getting.

It's my belief that the USA is in some serious trouble and headed for worse. The homeless situation ius way out of control and the fact that no one effin' DOES anything (the government just allows the terribble problem to worsen) is a huge red flag.

In the area where I was (north of LA) gentrification was a big problem. It wasn't so much a lack of wealth, but rather the massive gap, that was creating the problem. And I don't even mean that in a "rich people need to share more" sort of way (although that's always nice), but more so in that the housing and other costs of living have skyrocketed and options for lower-income families/people have been evaporating. This can easily push someone who would have been able to keep their head above the water while working a McDonalds completely under and onto the streets. Once on the streets, it is too dangerous and difficult to relocate to another state on foot. Furthermore there is a lot of justifiable defiant sentiment over the matter. Gentrification basically rolls out the notion that if an area is 'nice', then lower income people don't deserve to live there, and then pushing them out by gradually making the cost of living go through the roof. You don't see this sort of thing in a the sticks of Kentucky, for example, but you can find it all along California's coast. However they don't get 'pushed out'; they get pushed onto the streets, and as the gap widens, you've got millionaires stepping over homeless people on the sidewalks. But those same millionaires don't seem interested in funding programs to help the homeless - which makes sense, because they don't want a middle or low income class in 'their' cities - they want the poor people gone. All of the help I received while homeless was from charity volunteer type groups, people who didn't have the voting power due to being a small % to make changes in the legal system, but who are still good hearted people who just so happen to be wealthy.

There were a lot of homeless individuals in the city where I went to college, and it broke my heart. I'd give them some money when I had cash, but a dollar here and a dollar there isn't really going to change much.

For those of you who have been homeless: what is a simple thing that an average person passing you on the streets could do to help you? I've always wanted to help. I think that it is so wrong that some people get to live $10 million houses, while others sleep on the streets. And you're right; I'm sure some of the mentally ill homeless are incredibly smart and kind people, and that the "healthy" people treating them like garbage are missing out by not stopping and getting to know them.

The absolute best thing you can do is speak to them as though they are just regular human beings. Give them dignity and respect, instead of looking away like they are invisible, or showering them in pity. Ask them questions, listen, make appropriate eye contact. Tokens of kindness like small gifts or money are always very sweet of a person, but more than anything what everyone I met seemed to want was to feel human, and not like a feral animal. They wanted relationships. They wanted to talk and be heard. They wanted friends and to be able to trust people. You can't save them as far as giving them a house, medication, etc or forcing them into a program. But you can help them feel human, which is like the square one foundation to them working up the courage and determination to accept help when it is offered on down the line.

Based on my experiences/observations, sooo many of them are struggling with mental problems, so it's important to keep yourself safe while also acting normally with them. It's like that fine line between having empathy for someone with severe paranoia issues, while also keeping yourself safe.

Copper is right the best thing you can do is acknowledge they they are there. A smile, a nod, those count so much.
One memory I'll never forget is when I was in Dallas, not really a good place to be homeless, a really well dressed woman, one of those with the big blonde hair,was on her way into an elite store I was standing at a bus stop. I hadn't eaten in a while and the heat was getting to me, I must had looked pretty bad because out of all the people standing there waiting she stopped looked me in the eye and asked if I was alright. I was so panicky at being singled out but she was so kind. She went in the store and came back out with a bottle of water which tasted like heaven and helped a lot.

Well done excellent post.