Homeless people are twice as likely to have mental issues as the general population, and are less likely to receive treatment in this condition. According to the APA’s definition though, she and the author were already homeless before she was on the street:
Homelessness exists when people lack safe, stable, and appropriate places to live. Sheltered and unsheltered people are homeless. People living doubled up or in overcrowded living situations or motels because of inadequate economic resources are included in this definition, as are those living in tents or other temporary enclosures.
I think the idea that your own personal capacity is somehow directly linked to the level of dignity “life owes you” is so ingrained in capitalist / profit driven society, that even a thoughtful writer prepared to question society’s and her own assumption can fall into the trap of directly connecting personal “in-capacity” with what life hands you.
Thing is if you are a rich person with questionable mental health status–you might just end up running for president rather than homeless…
Care in the community was / is a thing in Europe as well, so not unknown to me, but I think has little to do with the assumption that the mentally ill is “other” and thus deserve differently…
This, I may be poor with some broken internal structure, but I got a free car with no reverse and I will be rebuilding the tranny on my kitchen table.
Knowledge is power, and it drives the life hacks which let me survive, that and cycling.
How people who work in healthcare can tolerate it is beyond me. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be the cashier and watch someone go from credit card to credit card to get essential treatment for their child and still come up short. Having worked in the field briefly, I can tell you that everyone is carefully insulated from the costs, including patients, until it’s time to pay.
It is one of the things that PTSD’d me, I was a firefighter paramedic, couldn’t do it anymore between the back and what we were charging as a public agency for the service. I used to give tips on dodging the bill and would purposefully not record the ID info properly, I got hell for that. EMS is bread and butter for many departments.
In the Middle East, people are not summarily ejected into the street if they cannot pay their rent. It’s considered to be taboo. That’s not to say there aren’t homeless people in the ME, or that poverty doesn’t exist. But the homeless are taken in by relatives, and it’s considered the height of cruelty to knock down a tent or shack being lived in by someone who has no place else to live. Landlords will work with a tenant who cannot make rent. American callousness, something which Americans receive extensive cultural and societal training in, constantly surprises me. You can see it in comments on this very blog sometimes (though we do a good job of keeping out the intellectual riffraff.)
Which I read as: given that she is stable and able her mental health issues shouldn’t impact her housing status.
and doesn’t read to me as you suggest
Why write that she has mental health issues (albeit well managed) if it’s not relevant to the subject at hand, we don’t learn anything about this woman except that she is homeless and has mental health issues. This shifts the previous focus on structural dysfunction in society onto an individual dysfunction.
This is the final sentence of the article and it definitely impacted my reading, planting a little tiny nagging doubt in my mind whether somehow she might have been the cause of her own misfortune. The easier it is to distance myself from a victim of society’s dysfunction, the easier I sleep…
I think it is important to question our own assumptions, which is the point I was making with my rhetorical question on which you commented.
Language is a fluid thing and I am trying to tease out a subtle point by suggesting that consciously or subconsciously even such a thoughtful author as Maureen might communicate a bias in which the link between mental ill health and homelessness is somehow justified.
This is the idea I wish some of my family members would come away with. I gather one of my brothers who works in the public sector hasn’t really been putting away money, based off the assumption that his pension will take care of him. I gather he doesn’t read the news, because IL is really one of the worst states to be making that plan in.
Looking at how the older generations in my family have weathered financial storms, my father having done a great job of saving and investing over the years has occasionally played the part of the social safety net for aunts and uncles during hard times. So I am in agreement (more or less) with @japhroaig, with the added caveat that you might also want to be prepared to help out in a crisis (per @anon61221983’s point about social safety nets).
For my part, if something happens to me, a lot of my liquid assets will go to taking care of my nephews. While alive, I make sure to keep enough cash reserves to help out friends and family if need be–because I have seen it happen to my elders already, multiple times.
I agree that we have an individual responsibility to ourselves and to our families, but the social safety net needs to be a responsibility of society as well, given how many people slip through the cracks. the reason I argue that is because those traditional social safety nets of family and community have been eroded by the way that the needs of capitalism have directed the state in the modern era, with the push to enshrine the individual as the core unit of our societies now a days. That’s had the effect of making us more mobile, more atomized within our societies, more alienated from those around us, because we’re not necessarily close to a more traditional social safety net which depended on kinship ties for mutual support… far too many of us just don’t have access to that for whatever reason.
I don’t think it’s an either/or scenario, here, rather an acknowledgement that some structures that took care of us have eroded and need to be addressed in some way. Certainly encouraging our families and communities to step is part of that, but we need to acknowledge that plenty of people don’t have that, often through no fault of their own.
Agreed. “Entitlement programs” as their opponents like to call them offer a great cost/benefit ratio for people on hard times, and there’s ample evidence that there’s little real abuse of those systems. We should be looking at ways to improve and expand those programs, instead of cutting them back.
Social security is a tougher nut to crack, since it was designed for a time when people didn’t live so long, and healthcare itself was much cheaper. Fixing healthcare spending is a good way to help crack it, but I got to discussing that with a friend who just received her MPH (since after a fashion, I work in healthcare), and she has a rather dim view of the prospects of that actually happening. Roughly: The healthcare industry doesn’t want to be cheaper, and every attempt at doing so they will just shuffle some paperwork and find a way around it.
You’re friend is spot-on, I think (which, I assume she knows more on this topic than I do, given her degree!). If the ACA was supposed to be a fix to people not being able to afford insurance, the problem is much deep than that… making health care for profit means that only some people are going to be able to afford it.
You are a wonderful bunch of people. Nice, thoughtful, wel thinking.
Reading boing for over ten years, signing in yesterday, on invite, on impulse, blame the home made calvados. Whathever, never mind, not important.
Only commenting to say thanks. Thanks for the discussions and read and learn material. (on countless topics).
Apart from that, try to save, how minor it seems, maybe only 10,- or 5,- a month. Or relative equivalent, it adds, and adds, good for (even) badder times. Not that you can do a lot with a small amount of mony savings. But the feel, its yours, and not spended. Not sure what I’m trying to say, but only, been there done that, not easy, but still proud about it. And turned to be useful.
I meant it in the sense that the clown makes you dance around and compete with each other, then steadily takes the chairs away and lets you fight over the remaining ones. Nobody looks at the guy with the huge stack of chairs because they are trying to stop their neighbour from taking their chair.
If you took it that the OP was suggesting ever so subtly that the homeless deserve homelessness due to mental illness, then you must not have read the piece with an open mind. The piece positively reeks of compassion. As well as fellowship, since she stated that she’s been homeless in NYC. The OP even questions her own mental makeup, giving us a quick inventory and status update.
The subtle point that I think you are missing is that the bias exists for a reason. An understandable reason. Homelessness and mental illness travel together. For reasons we do not fully understand. They are correlated. They are not “unrelated.” That is not to say that one causes the other. But the correlation exists, and it is relevant to the discussion.
To think that the author is suggesting this bias as a justification for her friend’s homelessness is pretty clearly to me your own biases talking. Instead, I see her searching for answers, imploring people for a way to stop the madness and doing what she can to help a fellow traveler. That’s not justifying anything. That’s called trying to help.
Take my mom for instance. She got put in the ER, told she needed a stent and had to be on expensive medication for a year, minimum. She gets a bill from the hospital says she was uninsured and they’ll ‘graciously’ wave some of the fees… leaving us ‘only’ owing about $100k on that bill (there have been and will be others, MANY others.) When that happened we had been with Blue Cross for many years, had been PAYING them for many years on time every time because they are why my sister’s medication isn’t cripplingly expensive. So in short they basically didn’t want to do their job and pay health costs.
