The Stigma of the Homeless

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The Stigma of the Homeless

                My first job that I had when I started working in the Mental Health field was working in a complex in Holly, MI called Rose Hill. I was so excited to be working there and to be looking at mental illness through someone else’s eyes. (I actually started my internship there and then started working after the internship). It was the first time that I has stepped outside of my own little world and saw something different and yet there was something very familiar about all of this.

                I got to know many different types of mental illnesses first hand rather than just reading it in a book and trying to decipher what it would look like in real life. You learn that their world is so real to them even though it looks so bizarre to us. Many of them see and hear things that we cannot and they are responding to the stimuli just as if we would if we had someone in front of us talking to us or arguing with us.

                When I left Rose Hill and moved to Seattle I started working in many different areas of the social services department. One of them was working for the people that were homeless. 99 % of the homeless are people that suffer with mental illnesses and are not on medications. Only 1 % of them are men and women that are down on their luck and do not have a home to go to. That only last for a short time if they happen to be homeless for any length of time. This is a good thing for them but a bad thing for all statistics meaning that 99 % of the homeless population will not be able to help themselves, they will need some kind of assistance to get off of the streets.

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                Back in 1878 Pontiac built its first psychiatric facility. It was called Eastern Michigan Asylum for the Insane. It was changed later on to Eastern Michigan Asylum. It was not until 1911 that they changed the name to Pontiac State Hospital and then to Clinton Valley Center in 1973 before finally being closed down in 1997. The Architecture of this building was spectacular, but what went on inside of this building was far less than impressive.   

                Many of the psychiatric facilities were shut down all around the same time as this one as a federally conformed  project to do away with unacceptable practices towards people that suffered with mental illnesses and those who others “thought” that they did not belong outside in the public. Facilities such as the one in Pontiac were found to be almost like torture chambers with inhuman practices that went far beyond abuse as we know it today. These things will not be known to the public, but I have lived here long enough to know what happened in these facilities before they stopped these practices. Certain types of abuse still remain today and are far less cruel, but are still abuse.

                Now that almost all of the facilities are shut down there was a state by state problem of where to house the people that suffered with mental illnesses. Now we have many different types of places opening up to help people take their medications and learn a trade so that they can try to work and be mainstreamed out into the public. Exactly the opposite of what they were trying to stop about 100 years or more ago. We have finally grown up and are trying to deal with the fact that just because someone looks and acts different does not mean that they are different and they are dangerous. Some were born different, but some were born just as you and I and something happened to them chemically. Their brain synapses are now misfiring just as I was born with a missing chemical in the brain so I have depression.  

                Some of these people were put into group homes, some into hospitals, some after the hospital were put into private facilities like the one that I worked at in Holly and others still went to the streets. It is not because of this that people are on the streets because there is always going to be homeless, but the numbers of the homeless did increase to a larger number creating a new problem for the social services to work through.

                Working in downtown Seattle I discovered a whole different world and loved what I did. They had a unique way of housing the homeless without making them feel like they needed to give something back for it. Many of the homeless are afraid of being cooped up in a room even though they had the right to come and go as they pleased. Whatever they needed was provided for them by the housing that they were given and the funding that they were getting by the state and federal.

                I worked with them helping them by picking up food from the food bank and they could come down and pick up what they wanted according to what I had and a limit of what they could take. And then I would cook a meal for them once a week so that they were eating something healthy at least that much. There was never a moment that was not full of liveliness. Everyone must work with the homeless and get to know them. They are people too and they are proud wonderful interesting human beings.  

 

                Imagine: you are raising a child and he/she is completely normal in your eyes. He/she is doing all of the normal things that a child does through every stage of her/his life. Then…he hits college years and moves into the dorms at the college and you start to see a change. You try to get your daughter to talk, but she is not talking or she is saying nothing is wrong. Suddenly everything comes crashing down around your world as you once knew it and your son is not acting the same at all and ends up in a psychiatric wing in a hospital. You find out that he has schizophrenia and is having audio and visual hallucinations with other psychotic features. You feel like you are going insane also and not sure what all of this means and where to start to begin to understand. Now try to imagine how the person feels that has the illness that is having the hallucinations. He is all of the sudden having these things happening to him and cannot understand why or cannot understand why anyone will not believe him that he is see what he sees or hears.

                Mental illness starts in people at different ranges of ages depending on the disorder. The other thing that usually happens is that mental illness is genetic. One does not have to worry that it is going to happen to them just because they have been near someone else that has it. It is not something you can catch like a cold. People that suffer with mental illnesses are generally harmless very few of them ever become violent. It has been my experience to try to get them on medication for their sake, but sometimes it is not what they want, it is what we want. There are a few medications that the doctors will use just to keep them under control and that is no way of working with them either. To use medications the person has to be willing to do this entirely on his/her own. It cannot be forced and it has to be written in a plan for this person.

                Most of the time the person cannot hack living under the pressure of the medication, the parents looking to them to change and the pressure of them to revert back into a functioning citizen that can pick up where he/she left off. That is when they usually start living on the streets. Some of them never get the right medication regiment and that is what makes them feel uncomfortable. Everyone’s body is different and responds to medication in a different way so it is a set of trial and error when it comes to medication, except they have found a really good medication that works well for schizophrenia that has been around for about 20 years now. It is the only one that has worked on just about everyone. There are a few that cannot take it, but that is very few. I saw them start to use it when I started working at Rose Hill and was so surprised at how it improved when I came back from Seattle years later.        

 

 

Many times people do not want to give money to the homeless when they are panhandling because; “they are just going to go out and buy alcohol and drugs with it anyways.” The first drug of choice for people that suffer with mental illnesses is what they know - alcohol. And if that does not help stop the hallucinations then they turn to drugs. Just about all of them smoke because the smoking has been proven to have a calming effect for them. Alcohol and cigarettes are the first thing that are tried before going to any other drug. If the person does not have a good support system they will continue on the downward spiral with stronger drugs. If they can get someone to help them then they might have a chance to get off of the alcohol and not go towards the drugs.

                People who have been on the street and have not bathed in a while are used to the way that they smell. They do not understand the way people want to back away from them and do not want to talk to them. They have a distorted picture of themselves because of their brain not functioning right. The next time you have a really bad cold and your head feels like it is in a cloud…think about how the people who suffer with mental illness feel all of the time only worse.

 

                I am challenging everyone to at least commit themselves to volunteering once or twice at a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter. It is an eye opening experience and it is fun. Many of the people that are homeless have a story to tell and many do not say anything at all. It is a way of giving back to your community and feeling good about it.