What’s Calgary Really Like?

This is my old stompin’ grounds. I hitch hiked out here back in 1968 and began work as a gravel truck driver delivering to the foot of the Husky Tower as it was being built. I’ve been all over this town. My parents got married here and so did I. It looks like my son will be married here too. I’ve met all kinds of people in Cow Town.

I came back here last year and was bustling around trying to make ends meet, as is my lot. I was working in the north east and living in the west end by the river. I was taking the C-train most of the time. That’s the Light Rail Transit in Calgary.

Nevertheless, I get home and realize I’ve lost my wallet. Do you have any idea what a major hassle it is to lose your wallet? Most of you probably do. It’s not the loss of money; it’s the loss of the ID. It takes months to get your driver’s license, health card, bank card; hell, even your library card requires a piece of mail with your address on in so that takes a while to come through. And of course every wallet has bits of pieces of paper and stuff that is real important information you will never get again. Let’s face it people, losing your wallet is a hell of a drag.

So I call the bank and cancel my bank card. I get Visa to shut down. I cal the police and there was a fairly helpful officer on the line who lodges all the info he can, including driver’s license, etc. It looks like my pocket was maybe picked or something. OK, that’s all done as evening comes to a close and I have no idea what to do next.

Morning comes and I find a crumpled up bus ticket rummaging in my coat. At least I can get downtown to the bank and maybe hunt around a little.

Downtown I drop into the Bay and security looks about and reports they haven’t seen my wallet. I tried a couple of coffee shops but to no avail. This sucker is lost.

As a last resort I cross Seventh Avenue into Calgary Transit’s office and ask at the desk if a wallet has been handed in.

“What’s the name?” says the clerk.

“Bruce Rout,” I answer and he punches the name into his terminal at the counter.

“We got it,” he says and heads off into the back. I can’t believe my good luck.

He returns and hands my wallet to me. “Open it and give me a piece of picture ID,” he says.

I open my wallet to take out my driver’s license and there, staring me in the face, is a brand spanking new monthly transit pass that I had just bought. It was totally transferable. Whoever found it could easily have taken it. I hand the desk clerk my license and check the inside pocket of the wallet. Sure enough, there’s a $5 bill in there, right where I left it. That was all the money plus a $75 bus pass. All ID was intact.

I showed the clerk. ”There’s my bus pass and all my money,” I said.

“You’re pretty lucky,” he said.

I took back my license and headed out. First thing I did then was call the cop shop and cancel the report on the lost wallet. They were stunned and very happy to hear there were still honest people in enough abundance that my wallet could be found intact including everything valuable.

This is a good town. I had lost my wallet at the transit station in the middle of the seedy part of town. They have all types there. When I say seedy, I mean real seedy. Whoever picked up my wallet probably never even opened it. Then again, they probably did open it to check who it belonged to. They probably saw the transit pass and the money and handed it in to the transit lost and found without even thinking of being dishonest.

It reminded me of the time when red China was first opened up to the west as a result of Nixon’s visit. One of the comments there was that Chinese people were so honest you could lose your wallet with money in it and it would be handed in to the authorities completely intact. You don’t need to go to China to find honest people. They’re right here. They’re all around us.

As I went through the rest of my day I could only chuckle intermittently. That’s because that’s Calgary. That’s what this city is like. This is a good town and these are good people. They work hard and they are basically honest.

Like I say, this is a good town.

Planting the Seed

It’s cold.

You are slowly but surly freezing to death. There is just you and a small cedar tree by the river in the snow. You have not slept in so long you cannot remember. The voices are starting to go away. They are much quieter now. You are starting to get tired, so very tired. Memories of your wife and children have faded. It is amazingly calm as darkness mercifully descends.

Across the river, in a modern, clean and warm office the mayor takes another sip from his favorite coffee mug and stands to look out his window over the river and park. There is a tree and a sleeping derelict beside it disappearing in the quickly passing evening haze. It is not his problem. Nothing can be done. He takes another sip of coffee and returns to work.

The next morning the cleanup crew has been called in to take away the body. It is difficult to straighten it out since it was clinging onto itself when death overtook it. It was probably trying to keep warm. There looks like frozen tears on frozen cheeks and a visage filled with pathos. It is not pleasant work.

A crew member removes a small stone clutched by a dead and frozen hand. The body is removed. The crewman lingers a little wondering why the body would be holding a stone. What does the stone mean? He turns it with his fingers and holds it to the light. It is an ordinary stone, no shine or sparkle, probably sandstone, nothing special.

But why was he clinging to it? Why, at the last moment of life, would this man cling to a simple and non-descript stone while freezing to death by a river? What is this stone?

He ponders it, examines it, and looks for some meaning to a meaningless death. It is as ordinary and insignificant as a homeless mentally ill nobody dying in the snow. Can there possibly be any meaning? Does it matter?

The stone, he thinks, is it real? Is any of this real? Is there really a problem? Are there really people dying?

Maybe it’s not. Maybe, like millions of those in power and authority, with responsibilities too great for any individual to handle, the stone is just as we perceive it. It’s not real. The problem is not real. It’s just as we perceive it. There may be a problem, but if it’s not my problem, it may as well not exist.

If the stone is not real, if the stone is as we perceive it rather than something that is there whether we perceive it or not, then nothing is real. Not even Truth itself.

If the stone is not real, and there is no real Truth, no reality outside of our perception, then right and wrong are as we perceive it. It’s not our problem.

If there is no stone, then Justice is as we make it and as we desire it. It is our intellect that rules. It is our will that controls the universe, and whoever can control the human will, controls reality. If there is no stone then we are free to deny what is real. Nothing is real.

That, it seems, or so postulates a humble crew man who cleans up dead bodies by the river in Calgary, is the crux of what is going on. We have become so bizarre, so divorced from reality; we cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge the existence of a simple stone. To do so would mean a great, great deal.

If the stone is real, the universe exists. It exists whether we perceive it or not. We have been given the incredible gift of being able to perceive the universe, but it was here long before we were born and will continue to be long after we are gone. The stone is just as valid a candidate as an observer as anybody else or any thing else. Who is to say it cannot perceive being held by a kind and good man by the river before the lights go out?

Why is there a major problem of homeless mental illness in every major city in the world? Whose bright idea is it to prevent hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of sick and suffering people from medical care and medicine? And whose bright idea is to keep them suffering?

This is not a matter of public opinion. It does not matter if it is but one person or a majority of the voting population. If a child is suffering and you have the ability to alleviate that suffering, and do nothing, then that is abuse of that child. It is not a legal matter; it is the difference between what is wrong and what is right. And wrong and right exist regardless of what you may perceive. Truth, justice, knowing the difference between right and wrong, and a vast host of other verities our ancestors have given their lives to uphold, actually do exist. They are real.

And for anyone to allow suffering, especially of the sick and homeless, in our ridiculously wealthy society, whether it’s your responsibility or not, is very simply wrong. It indicates a denial of what is real. It indicates a denial of the truth. And that is the path to a dedication to what is truly evil. That is the legacy we will leave for our children, because the universe will continue to go on and leave us behind.

So, dear Reader, what can you do? Above all, don’t endanger yourself. If you are moved, if you believe that the words you are now reading are real, whether they are printed on paper, on a computer screen or being read to you. If what you are reading now is real and not a part of some manipulative world you have dreamed up or been caused to believe. If you really believe there is right and wrong. If you believe Truth is what exists independently of our perception, then this is what you do.

Next time you are out walking, pick up a simple and humble stone, nothing special. Keep it with you. Put it on your desk, dashboard or whatever. Each of you, whether working in a library, handling a desk, patrolling, or just trying to make a living, knows that at some time we could have done something to save someone.

We simply acknowledge that there is a right and wrong. Maybe next time it will be different. Maybe next time we can make a small but significant change in the course of the universe. Just a little is enough.

Because we can see that as a crew man puts a pebble in his pocket and walks away, all there was to witness the death of a good man was a stone, and his only friend was a tree. And that’s the difference between what is real and what is not.

Say hello to Austin

Hey, you might want to check out http://www.austinmardon.org/. It’s Austin’s website. Austin Mardon just won the Order of Canada about a week and a half ago. He won it for his work with the homeless mentally ill. His list of achievements are very long and I encourage you to give his site a boo. Also, click on this "make Austin an MBE" and submit your vote.

We talked for about half an hour today over the phone. I’ll relate a bit about his point of view and can hopefully expand in the future.

“There are approximately 700 homeless schizophrenics in Calgary. That’s specifically homeless schizophrenics rather than mentally ill people in general. There are other diseases like manic depression and so on,” he said.

He explained that work in New York City had shown that a program of getting medication to the homeless mentally ill, in the form of injections every other week, had resulted in a huge success rate.

“With Risperdal Consta, you would only need a nurse to give an injection once every two weeks, and a general practitioner to initially diagnose the homeless schizophrenic,” he said.

“This is not a homeless issue,” he emphasized, “It’s a medical issue.”

He added that the program required the permission of the person undergoing the program.

“What they did,” he said, “was they provided the person’s welfare check with a very good meal along with the injection.”

”It is much easier to manage an injection once every two weeks logistically and financially than to give a pill every day,” he explained,

“Government and the public keep talking about solving the homeless problem. Ironically Risperdal Consta could solve the problem of schizophrenic homelessness. Without Risperdal Consta the government could spend many millions dollars treating homeless schizophrenics without making any impact whatsoever,” he said.

Austin also pointed out that those who suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease receive treatment and help but those who are homeless and mentally ill do not.

“There is such a stigma against mental illness,” he said.

We talked for a bit about different medications and both of us agree on the benefits of Risperdal. He was surprised to learn there is a generic for the drug in pill form that is very cheap. However, he argued that just giving the homeless mentally ill a bottle of pills to try and hang on to and self-regulate their medications is foolish to say the least. “There is no way that a homeless mentally ill person could do that,” he said. He argues that the injection once every two weeks is a much better way to go.

“There needs to be established a social connection with the broader community, you know, in shelters with the medical community. You don’t need that much … you need to be creative.

“One last thing … with generations past if someone became psychotic and was homeless they attempted to house them, usually in squalid conditions, in rural houses or warehouses, but we don’t even do that today. And the irony is that we have medical treatment.

“For example, John Nash who won the Nobel Prize in 1992 was actually homeless at several points in his life. Some of the people who are homeless, if given medical treatment rather than being ignored, might actually get into the process of recovery.

“What I’ve seen is the incredible results of people who have cooperated with their treatment. I believe there is hope. It involves the medical community.”

Trying to get through to the Mayor

It has been a while since I posted here. I’ve moved to High River south of Calgary and had to get into the joys of starting a new job. It’s been a hectic past three weeks.

So today I figured that since there seems to be so much ink in the Herald on the plight of the mentally ill in Calgary, coupled with parallel article on homelessness, I should call in on the mayor and ask what he thinks of the whole thing.

It’s easy to get to the mayor’s office. The number is right on the net. Your request for an interview is passed to Mark Henry, the mayor’s chief of staff. He called back within an hour.

What’s the city’s position on the homeless mentally ill?

“It’s under provincial jurisdiction,” said Mark, “Housing is provincial and mental illness is a provincial matter.”

“Are you saying you have nothing to do with the homeless mentally ill in Calgary?” I asked.

“It’s a provincial matter,” he replied.

“Can I ask the mayor’s position on the fact there are anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 severely mentally ill people living on the river banks in Calgary?” I continued.

“The position, as I said before, is that it is a provincial matter,” he replied, “You should try calling Ms. Fritz, the associate minister in Edmonton.”

“I already have the call in,” I replied, “Thanks.”

And that was about it.

Interesting Times

The Feds have just announced a $55 million per year (five-year) commission/centre into mental health and it’s to be based in Calgary. Excellent.

So far it looks like it’s going to end up as a building or group of offices.

Let’s get the links here: There’s http://secure.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=PG_910_E&cw_topic=910&cw_rel=AR_1730_E which says homelessness is a huge contributing factor to mental illness.

Then there’s the Senate report which everyone is waving around, the link to which is on the side of this page. It’s been there for months.

I was walking by the river yesterday when I saw the headline announcing the commission jump out at me from the news stand. I had to buy it. It’s the first paper I’ve bought in years. I was talking about it with my son and he proposed the following scenario:

A: Hey, the press is really coming down on this mental illness thing.

S: Oh, hey, I guess we better do something. What have we got on it?

A: We got this Senate report from about a year ago. It looks pretty good.

S: A year ago eh? We better get onto that. What’s it say?

A: Says the same thing the press is saying.

S: Oh, ok, what’s it cost?

A: $85 million over five years.

S: Hmmm, right, give them $55 million. Where is the pressure from the press coming from?

A: Calgary.

S: CALGARY?!!! That’s my home constituency! Set up a centre and get some sort of press announcement fast. Send the minister!

And so it goes. It seems Steve has been moved by the travesty of mental illness and homelessness in his home town. Quoting the Herald, he says, “We see mental health disease everywhere.” Actually, kidding aside, I believe he is being sincere. I mean it.

It’s important to realize you are not going to solve this problem overnight. A building is good. A long-term commission is good. But please remember it’s been done before and we’re still hooped.

This is because of the fundamental problem with our society. We can find solutions to problems but we have great difficulty applying them. Building a centre as an answer to a social problem is a perfect case in point.

It’s like this … we see someone homeless and mentally ill. We say, ok, they’re homeless, I guess we had better give them a home. So we take them, and clean them up, give them a shave and descent clothes and maybe even a job. We set them up in a nice place, give them meds, check in on them once in a while and see how they do. I’ll tell you what happens. Five seconds after you leave, they take off and they’re back on the river bank. Calgary has done this before. It doesn’t work. It is not a sustainable solution to the problem. It helps the working poor, but the mentally ill -- a huge proportion of the homeless -- nada.

The drop-in centre is a fabulous facility with incredibly hard working people. It’s jammed packed and overflowing. It cannot solve the problem; it can only deal with the symptoms. It is not designed to solve the problem, only to try and cope with it.

The problem is not just a problem with the mentally ill; it is also a problem of our society. Re-read with Madeline says about this. We have become an extremely materialistic society and it’s killing us. The homeless mentally ill and how we deal with them underscores the illness of our society.

To explain: the Webster’s dictionary says materialism is a denial of any form of spirituality. Everything is material or physical. Spiritual things like value, honesty, truth, integrity, love, selflessness and so on, the things that are indicative of the human spirit, do not exist in a materialist dogma; they are the results of physical interactions like ingrained pathways of the mind trained by a lifetime of chemical reactions among neurotransmitters.

To put it in clear terms, we all have a choice: we are either very intelligent animals or we are spiritual beings having a physical experience. I really don’t care which decision you make on this. Just realize there are consequences to the decision you make.

So, if we follow this dichotomy, if there is a problem, a materialistic solution is to find something material or physical to solve it, like a building or drugs. It fails to recognize that it is not money per se that has the power to solve problems; it’s people. This is a very difficult point to get across. Our society has lost sight of competency and replaced it with levels of measurable qualifications which may not actually solve the problem.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with capitalism; it’s what we do with it that counts.

The Senate report is very clear. We can solve the problem. It may take five to ten years, but we can solve it. To do so we need drugs and shrinks – competent shrinks. Yes, we need support of other people. We need to end prejudice. We probably need a building. But without shrinks and drugs, you’re not going anywhere. It’s people – competent people – who will solve the problem.

Let’s clarify this. The commission is spending $55 million over five years. That’s $11 million a year. Calgary spends about $55 million a year on the homeless. So $11 million is not that much money. I’m not saying we turn it down; it’s just we have to be careful with every penny. So how about we try a different tack. Let’s take five shrinks and 10 cops. Cops cost 100 grand per year, everything considered. For shrinks, budget 150 grand each. Drugs are cheap. That’s roughly $2 million a year. Get these guys on the street and start pushing anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers like street drugs. Follow up with support and lead the sick to long term treatment without locking them up. You want to deal with this problem, then get off your seat, away from your desk and your computer, and out onto the street with the people.

To cure mental illness, you have to hit it with meds to get the fire under control. You follow and support with therapy to finally douse it. In five years you won’t need a building – they’ll build one on their own by themselves and with no help from anyone.

Interview with Dr. Nordli

This post is a bit of a mish-mash of different things…

Dr. Nordli and I have been friends ever since I came back from New Zealand. She’s a wonderful doctor who takes a real interest in getting her patients better. She’s outspoken as sin, but a heck of a doctor.

She’s worked for six years in the Ponoka institution which is a world class hospital for brain damage and has a long history in treating people with mental illness. Dr. Nordli will be missed there by staff and patients.

If you happen to be severely mentally ill, and you are very lucky, you end up in Ponoka. According to what Dr. Nordli says, you’ll only be in there, usually, for three to four weeks. I don’t know yet what the follow-up is to your stay. That is something I have to look up.

Now, last Thursday, (and this is Monday), the Calgary police beefed up their personnel on the lower east side due to a “spike” in recent crime.

“There has been an increase in arrests,” said S/Sgt Barry Balerud. He said there have been 33 arrests so far and 15 of them are criminal code offences, mostly involving drugs.

He explained there is a lot of criminal activity in the area, mostly drug trafficking.

S/Sgt Balerud also explained that the purpose of the police crackdown was not to deal with the homeless or mentally ill; they were looking for criminal activity in particular. He said they do have a Mobile Response Team in the downtown core run by the Calgary Health Centre that they call on in cases of coming across people with mental illness issues.

However, he said, he did not know of anyone calling on the unit or of dealing with anyone with mental illness issues during the crackdown. He said he’s been out there himself and even in talking with fellow officers, there has been no one taken to the psych ward since Thursday as far as he is aware.

I’m also waiting for a download of info from Emergency Medical Services who deal with picking up mentally ill people on the street and getting them to a hospital if called upon by police.

Paul Lapointe of EMS explained that they have a special unit in the downtown core for such a purpose but he is unaware of any increase in activity during the crackdown. He said they usually respond to requests from police but sometimes their drivers can call in if they see someone they suspect is in real trouble.

I’ll fill in more details when I get them. In the meantime, have a good one.

River Ride

It's a bit long but I think it's worth it.

Old men on bicycles

I haven’t written in yonks! There was this flurry of activity and then things got so hectic that it was impossible to put pen to paper. It’s old men on bicycles. If you want to get in tune with the homeless in Calgary, you got to get on a bike.

Somebody had a brilliant idea. He/she, somebody, got the idea that we could get old bikes, fix them up and let the homeless have a free bike to get around town. What a great idea.

And you can see them all over town, in the morning, afternoon and at night. They are peddling like mad, screaming through traffic with the fear of God in their eyes. Then again, maybe it’s the fear of the traffic. Have you ever tried biking through downtown traffic in rush hour? I didn’t think so. It’s quite the experience – for both the peddalist and the drivers in the cars. Sometimes I don’t know who is the more frightened.

You see, this is the prairies. It’s flat -- real flat. There is a beautiful river park running right through town for miles and miles and bike paths on both sides of the river. It’s mostly flat and great for getting on your bike in the hot summer and getting all over town for free. It also is great for keeping in shape. I’ve lost a ton of weight.

I’m going to try and get down to the bike shop in the drop-in centre this weekend and see what’s up.

Mental illness affects the body as well as the mind. You’re either going like a bat out of hell all the time or you can’t get off the couch. If you’re in between, you’re a lot closer to sanity. Hopping on a bike not only keeps your body in shape, it’s a great way to forget about, or ignore the voices going on in your head -- especially if it’s rush hour.

The plan at the bike shop is pretty fair. You fix a couple of bikes and the third one is yours – free. If anyone is interested, they can learn how to fix bikes and in this town, that’s cash in the bank. It is just about impossible to find a decent bike mechanic. I had to hunt all over town to find mine in a made-over church in Kensington called Lifesport. They have a great young bike mechanic with an incredibly dry and sharp wit. It took forever to find a place that does a decent job on bikes. There are a lot of bike shops in the middle of this on-going boom that simply don’t fix bikes; they don’t have the staff.

I have no idea how many people have managed to hook a job from the drop-in bike shop training ground, but I’d love to find out.

A New Header

My son tells me I’ve just discovered the internet.

Let’s see, I first started working on computers in 1968 on the first IBM 360 ever built. We didn’t have none of these fancy terminal thingies. No way, we used punch cards. And when we wrote stuff, we wrote it on a typewriter. It was before your time.

As a matter of fact, I had a portable Underwood I hauled back and forth hitch hiking across Canada on good old number one. I even packed it across the Yellowhead and up to Williams Lake.

But I’m not talking about writing here; I’m talking about all this new-fangled technology stuff. It’s unreal. We never had this click, drag, cut and paste stuff. When we needed something we cut it in FORTRAN and used drivers in Assembler. And, let me tell you, you cut your own drivers. A new printer, plotter, terminal, modem or whatever came along and you whipped up a driver using some Assembler Code and cut it into FORTRAN to make it look nice and you were away.

After a while I broke down and learned C and eventually C++, enough to keep up to the mathematical software coming out. I kept an eye on what was developing because I was interested in what the nerds were up to. So when I started out on this project, I thought I’d give blogging a whirl.

Holy snot is there ever a lot of new stuff you can get your hands on! And it’s free too. The blog site is fairly common, everyone can do it. I’ve noticed the news stuff is mostly techie with some news feeds from the pros. So I think I’m a little on the edge. Of course my wife has pretty well always thought I was on the edge, but that’s another story.

I’ve done a fair amount of writing and I’ve had some very positive and supportive feedback on the stories I’ve done. But there’s a bit of glitch here. You see, pod casts don’t download text and I don’t feel like writing a text driver for I Pods. So I have to pod cast a summary of my stories every time I post.

And as you can tell, I’m just starting out on this vid-casting stuff. I’m not very good at it. At least that’s the feedback I’m getting, mostly from my family. And they’re trying to be as polite as possible. So I decided to cut a header vid just like the pros.

I grabbed the camcorder, hopped on my bike and headed off in a blazing streak of pink. My bike’s a pink European racing bike, about twenty years old – an old Steve Bauer – a Canadian firm.

I took various shots heading into and out of town. It’s not hard to find homeless people and fairly easy to find the mentally ill wandering downtown. Of course, it’s important to keep the camera at the ready. And you have to pack it in your knapsack while you’re riding around.

The problem is that you spot something good to shoot, like a homeless campsite by the river, and you have to jump off the bike, dig through the knapsack and get out the camera and take the shot. It’s ok when you don’t have people around. You can take your time. But when I got into town, I had to lock up the bike and get the camera at the ready while walking around.

And you can get into a bit of a jam if you start shooting druggies doing deals. It’s best to act real casual and shoot from the hip. It takes practice and you waste a lot of film, or tape.

Nevertheless, just as I’m packing up, some man wanders by rummaging through garbage cans and I have to dig out the camera really fast and toss caution to the winds.

Later, I was approaching the east end of town when I managed to capture an old fellow who couldn’t sit still, though he tried. He looked like he was trying to adjust to his meds. He had that medicated shuffle while he walked and a fearful, paranoid look in his eye while he slowly passed.

Going by the river, there were many homeless sleeping in the park. I don’t know if they were mentally ill or not; I didn’t ask them. But it was good to get out and take it in. No one waved or said hi. Last week I did a walk around and there were a lot of friendly people calling out hello and telling me to smile more.

I even saw a small group of First Nations people helping and befriending an older man who looked pretty spaced out. I don’t know what that is about, so I’m tucking it away for future reference.

I got home and fire-wired the vid into Movie Maker and started hacking. I got it down to 35 seconds and used some of my son’s music as background. He wrote and recorded it. I stole it. I hope he doesn’t find out.

I’ve posted it here and I hope to hear some criticism on it. I’ve got to stop “umming” so much. I do that since I’m trying to think of what to say next. I’m trying to remember what I’ve written and get my thoughts in order. It’s too much. From now on I’m scripting my pod casts and concentrating on being smooth.

But I’m really more of a writer than an actor or pod caster. I guess I’m just old fashioned.

Nevertheless, it’s time for this old dog to learn a few new tricks. Thanks for hanging in there. Hi Sarah.

On curing mental illness

How to cure Mental Illness

This article is gong to be a little difficult to write. Nevertheless, I think I should give a little feedback. I’ve been getting comments on other sites, like Facebook, and I’ve pasted a couple here to see if it would stimulate conversation. Time will tell. To let you know, I’m being read in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada, the UK and in Chile.

Chile? Yeah, I guess that page translator comes in handy. This subscription thing is all so new to me; I don’t really know how it works until I try it out. So far, there are people who have been kind enough to subscribe and this will probably be the first article to hit their emails.

The big comment I get is that people want me to interview street people. They want to hear from the homeless and get their point of view. A lot of people have ideas on attacking or managing homelessness and it’s very important to hear the views from the street and incorporating that into management business plans. And, believe me, there are people who are surveying the views of the homeless. It may be inconsistent or not incorporated, but nevertheless, there are people out there trying to solve the problem of homelessness and listening to the views of the street.

I’ll get there; I promise. But first, I have to do the homework. If I’m talking to some poor incoherent man, I have to have a purpose to it. I want to be pretty clear in my head where I’m going with the interview and to give the guy a voice. I also want you to be prepared.

Now, I’ve been saying all along that mental illness can be cured, or in the words of the feds, people can recover from it. There are certain steps to be taken in order for it to work. But it does work.

I’ve been hunting the net and the library and talking to shrinks and psych nurses and there is a wide spectrum of analysis on the subject of mental illness. Some say you are born that way and that’s the way you are going to stay. Usually it is put to the patient that mental illness is like diabetes; you just have to stay on your meds for the rest of your life and so long as you are on the meds you are normal.

My response is that diabetes is a disease of the pancreas wherein not enough insulin is produced to digest sugars. Mental illness is a disease of the mind. If you don’t know the difference between the pancreas and the brain, please refer to your medical journal. The pancreas is located somewhere below the stomach while the brain is somewhere between your ears. If you keep looking, you’ll find it.

Nevertheless, there is medication. And if you’re to have any hope of dealing with mental illness, you’re going to have to deal with meds. There is simply too much evidence about the incredible benefits of psychiatric medication to rule it out. The problem is not the meds, it’s the fact that the meds are seen as a silver bullet, a cure-all. They are over-prescribed, harming the patient, and they’re seen as a way of not having to deal with the patient. The shrink becomes nothing more than a drug pusher on behalf of the pharmaceutical companies. He/she reads DSM-IV, looks up symptoms, matches them as best as possible to what seems to be going on with the patient and proscribes the meds. Then closes the book on the patient other than to ensure the meds are being taken and the patient seems to be on an even keel.

There is the constant admonition that if you stop taking your meds, you will end up back in the hospital, where perhaps drastic action will need to be taken.

This is pretty well the state of the art in modern psychiatric therapy and has been for the past 15 years or so. Why they aren’t allowing the homeless mentally ill access to a secure supply of meds, is somewhat beyond me. If they buy into this prognosis, how come they aren’t using it?

However; and here’s the key, after ten or 15 years of people taking meds and having regular visits to their shrink, some are actually recovering. It’s rare, but it happens. And the feds have picked up on it.

Time to start quoting form this thing – from The Face of Mental Illness, page 47:

Treatment to assist in recovery from mental illness must reflect its complex origins. A variety of interventions such as psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, medication and occupational therapy can improve an individual’s functioning and quality of life. Since mental illnesses arise from disorders of brain functioning, medication is often an important part of treatment.

So, each patient is going to be different. I don’t think that’s saying anything new, but if everybody’s different, then we’ve got to stop treating everyone the same. There’s more:

Assumptions about Recovery

1. The task of consumers is to recover. Professionals do not hold the key to recovery: consumers do. The task of professionals is to facilitate recovery; the task of consumers is to recover. Recovery may be facilitated by the consumer’s natural support system.
2. A common denominator of recovery is the presence of people who believe in and stand by the person in need of recovery. Seemingly universal in the recovery concept is the notion that critical to one’s recovery is a person or persons in whom one can trust to “be there” in times of need.
3. A recovery vision is not a function of one’s theory about the causes of mental illness. Recovery may occur whether one views the illness as biological or not. The key element is understanding that there is hope for the future, rather than understanding the cause in the past.
4. Recovery can occur even though symptoms reoccur. The episodic nature of severe mental illness does not prevent recovery. As one recovers, symptoms interfere with functioning less often and for briefer periods of time. More of one’s life is lived symptom-free.
5. Recovery is a unique process. There is no one path to recovery, nor one outcome. It is a highly personal process.
6. Recovery demands that a person has choices. The notion that one has options from which to choose is often more important than the particular option one initially selects.
7. Recovery from the consequences of the illness is sometimes more difficult than recovering from the illness itself. These consequences include discrimination, poverty, segregation, stigma and iatrogenic effects of treatment.

Adapted from Anthony WA. A recovery-oriented service system:
setting some system level standards.
Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal 2000;3:159–68.

So, there ya go. It all makes perfect sense.

1. Get on the right meds, and take the minimum dosage that will still kick in. Don’t overdose and don’t rock your meds. Stay steady over a couple of years at a time. Reduce it when you feel it’s right and under the supervision of a shrink. It’s your meds, not the shrink’s.
2. Get a shrink you can relate to. It’s very hard and it’s rare. The greatest attribute a shrink can have is empathy. There are very few who have it. Usually you get a new shrink every couple of months. Be patient, a good one will come around and then you hang onto ‘em.
3. Get your finances in order. Forget work, get on social assistance, and believe me, you qualify. Get the social worker to fill out the forms for you. Tell them you’re too sick to fill out the forms. They’ll understand. If at all possible get onto a federal disability pension. It’s made for people like you.
4. If you’re on a disability pension, there are usually free courses and programs you can get into. Get into them. You’re going to be down for a few years so you may as well make the best of them.
5. Quit smoking. Yes you can. If you have the incredible courage and self-control to get this far, you can quit smoking like falling off a log.
6. Quit drinking, quit drugs. See point 5.
7. Constantly build up a system of support. They’re your real family. As a result of mental illness, you have pushed everyone away and now you’re alone. Time to turn that around and accept help and love from everyone. There’s a lot of it out there. Hang with sane people; they’re on your side.
8. Be happy. Write, read, paint, go for walks, study, and make up for lost time. Enjoy your new life.

The big thing, is you have to decide to get better. Forget about admitting you're mentally ill. That's too hard. Nobody is goingto admit they're mentally ill. But wanting to get better? Hey, everyone can do that.

Ok folks. Thanks for hanging in there.

Interview with Kirsten

Kirsten is a remarkable woman. She’s trying to finish off her master’s degree in dance and working three jobs to make ends meet. And making a living as a contemporary dancer in this society is no mean feat.

Her project is to relate in some way to the homeless as a contemporary dancer and choreographer. In order to get better contact with this she worked as a volunteer in the kitchen for the fall and winter last year at the Riverfront Drop-in Center for the homeless.

She’s a young single woman, very pretty and you would think she would be totally intimidated by working with the homeless, but not Kirsten. The woman has incredible courage and is willing to work in this field without question.

One of the big issues she has to wrestle with is the purpose of what she is doing. She is aware of the rescuing syndrome wherein someone in a privileged position hooks into self gratification by helping or rescuing someone they feel is beneath them. It’s a tough call and an issue everyone must deal with when doing this kind of work if they are going to be successful at all. People being so-called “rescued” can smell it a mile away and see through pretentiousness like you were wearing it. Kirsten has gotten through that.

“It’s amazing,” she said after the vid was done, “There’s so much I didn’t talk about. I mean like, there are all these people lining up, and there’s not enough food for them.

“I guess what they’re doing is they have to save some food for the people working night shift and that’s why they have to cut people off.

“But that’s what they do all day long. They walk. Then they come back for lunch, and they have to line up for that. Then they go out walking again because there is no place for them. Then they line up for dinner. They get a handful of corn, a potato and a wiener, and that’s it. That has to sustain them.

“If there’s no place for them, they have to walk to another shelter and line up again. And if there is no place there, they walk to some other shelter and line up again.

“So that’s what they do all day; they walk. They line up, and they walk again. They never get a chance to sleep. I guess they sleep wherever they can, in alleys, in the park, in hallways or corridors. That’s their life.”

“Oh yes,” she continued, “there’s this program for new mothers who are addicted to cocaine. Apparently that’s really big and is working really well. And it’s really needed too. They do have lots and lots of programs but I don’t know what they have for the mentally ill.

“Have you talked to CUPS? I hear they have something but I don’t know what it is. Apparently the hours to get access to them are pretty restricted. I guess it’s pretty restricted everywhere.”

"Oh and another thing I didn't talk about when I'm working there. There's the smell. The awful smell, there's no place for these people to shower or to clean up."

And that’s pretty well what it’s like to be homeless in Calgary. You walk, you line up, you get to eat a little, and you sleep wherever and whenever you can. If you’re mentally ill, even that can be very difficult to manage.

Concerning interview with alderman Madeline King

Interview with Alderman Madeline King

Madeline is one busy lady. We’re in the middle of Stampede and the PM is in town. Nevertheless, because of the issue of homelessness and the mentally ill, she set aside a half hour to see me in her office. It was a very hot afternoon.

Sitting together at her conference desk, she explained the issue of homelessness and the mentally ill from someone at the top. Madeline is the alderman for the downtown ward and her ward contains, by far, the most number of homeless people. She also voted against an injection of housing cash from the province saying that we need to direct our attention to people with addictions and mental illness first. I thought it was a gutsy move and that’s why I wanted to listen to what she had to say in more detail.

“The keys to the future,” she began, “lie with housing first. People have to have a home with services in conjunction with the home.”

“We must make sure people have access to psychiatric services,” she said.

I had said that it is very difficult for homeless people to get access to psychiatrists and almost impossible to get to a supply of medication.

“We need to reduce the time in shelters and get to services,” she said agreeing, “Too much time is spent preparing people for a future.

“We need to look carefully first at the hardest to house,” she explained, “At the moment, what we do in the city is , we just rely on the waiting list of the Calgary Housing Society.

“It has an independent board and they decide on who to house first based on management. We could review this as a city to see if money goes more effectively to the wait list.

“More than 2/3 of the homeless are single men and they don’t figure in the Calgary Housing Society’s waiting list.”

She paused. She took a sip on her diet coke and thought momentarily.

“The amount of homeless we have is indicative that the market economy is not working,” she said.

I have to admit, that is a powerful statement.

“We need some softening. We have to understand when government contributes more to people, it is a huge benefit to society,” she said.

“When we closed mental institutions it was seen as a cost cutting measure and not enough was invested in the resultant programs,” she said.

We discussed that point for a little bit. It seems from the process of deinstitutionalization, about 20 years ago, the mental institutions were simply shut down and the patients were sent out onto the street to fend for themselves. There was simply nothing done for them. Madeline nodded in agreement.

“What worries me so much these days,” she said, “is the increase of drug use with mental illness. So many people are put in harm’s way. It is very disturbing …” She paused and for a moment appeared, in a way, very uncomfortable thinking of the mentally ill toe to toe with the drug community.

She continued, “We haven’t yet been able to build suburbs capable of including all members of society.” She said the suburbs are designed for young married couples with small children. “If you’re one of them, then there’s a lot for you,” she said.

“But,” she said, “If you don’t fit in, there’s no where else to go. You have to go downtown, and the downtown core becomes a haven for the drug trade.

“And if you’re mentally ill,” I interjected, “all you have is the river.”

She smiled and looked at me as if to say, ‘you got it.’

She recommended a book titled “Million Dollar Murray”. Here’s the Google link: http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=million+dollar+murray&btnG=Google+Search&meta.

A cursory glance at the site proposes that it’s probably easier, by far, to solve the problem than to manage it, which is what I’ve been trying to articulate all along. But that’s another story. I’ll get onto it.

Madeline and I said our farewells; I said thanks and headed off.

More on this site

Well, things have been going well as I try and figure out how this stuff works. I managed to get a feed installed, after much conundrum, from a discussion group I started with Google. It only took a couple of days to figure out. Then I managed to get a subscription button happening which I hope will give you updates of the latest posts. I haven't tried it out yet.

It seems so far there are about 30 hits per day which I guess isn't bad for just starting out. I haven't hit the spiders for web searches. We're at the bare beginning. I have no idea how many people are subscribed to this site, which is all just as well.

I've noticed a fair number of people are into doing everything to increase the number of visits to various sites. Personally I don't care that much. If I have only 30 or so readers who are interested in what I'm writing about, then I'm very happy and grateful to those 30 people. Sure it's great to have a large readership, but it's hard to write well if you're thinking about readership. It's an art form and when you are trying to think of who is going to buy your art, you screw up. So I'm going to ignore the subscription list. If you like it; you read it.

What I'm trying to do is put out something with quality. I'm more interested in writing well and there are wonderful people who comment on what I've done. And you have no idea how that helps.

I've just had an interview with a wonderful lady: alderman Madeline King who is responsible for the downtown core. We talked for a little under half an hour but covered the main points. She is very concerned for the homeless mentally ill in her ward, and that's most of them in the city. She seems like she has the intestinal fortitude to instigate change. I think she's one of us.

I'll write up the interview as soon as I can.

Nadia writes in

Bruce,

sorry it took me a while to get back to you about your new blog. I've just finished reading through all your posts.I have to say my first reaction was excitement that someone decided to blog about this topic.

When I was in Calgary my bus went past this huge building with people crammed onto the cement outside and then i saw the 'homeless shelter' sign. Up until then I hadn't realized how many people must have moved to Calgary for work.

The only other thing I've come into contact with about this is a few isolated articles (from some Edmonton newspaper) condemning the housing shortage in Calgary.

This blog is totally cool for a few reasons.It's really easy to read (it flows like a narrative, like you're speaking) and each piece is a comprehensive synthesis of a lot of research. not only that, but you're attacking a huge issue (that to me seems overwhelming) with really specific questions, and as an interested reader i'm less intimidated by the scope of the topic.

not only that, but your focus on homeless people who are mentally ill is completely new to me. it never occured to me that there was another category of people besides working poor and drug addicts.

this is something that piqued my curiosity but that felt too big to tackle all by myself. and i like that your blog doesn't just want to outline the problem, it also wants to find possible actions or solutions.

what made you get interested in it? i'd like to know.cool blog, and i thought your first video broadcast was fine!

Nadia.

How big is this problem?

I spent an afternoon down at the central library. Libraries are those places with lots of books and are the repositories of information for a society. They’re great places to dig up reasonably reliable facts about pretty well everything. They have Google pretty well beat to hell on reliability and you can always jump on a terminal and Google what you want anyway.

I walked up to the information counter on the third floor, by the government publications and said that I was doing a project on the Homeless Mentally Ill in Calgary. I was invited to sit at a desk and they kept dropping reports, documents, brochures and anything they could find on the subject onto my desk for the rest of the afternoon. There’s a lot of stuff on this.

The information is all there. It’s been studied big time. But you really have to dig to make sense of it and you have to sort it all out since there is conflicting data. So I kept my focus on one simple question, how many homeless mentally ill people are out on the streets of Calgary right now. Difficult question to answer.

The first document I went through was the count of the homeless in Calgary in 2006. It’s an amazing document. I have included it in my list of links on the right hand side of the page here unless I’ve moved it somewhere. Ah, the heck with it, I’ll include it here: http://www.calgary.ca/docgallery/bu/cns/homelessness/2006_calgary_homeless_count.pdf . I love this media; it’s so easy to disseminate information.

Nevertheless, this city, every couple of years, gets a mess of university students, beaurocrats, desk jockeys and so forth to go out into the night in the middle of May and literally count all the homeless people, including parks, shelters, buses, remand centres and whatever. Long story short, they counted about 3,500 people on the street with no place to call home. However it’s worse than that. Let me quote from deep in the document:

The number of homeless persons reported is underestimated because not every homeless person is “visible” and because the count is a one-night snapshot that cannot determine the number of different individuals who may be homeless over a given period of time. Those that are not visible and therefore cannot be enumerated include persons who, on the night of the count, do not have a permanent residence to return to if they so choose, but instead, may be “couch surfing” (i.e., staying at the homes of friends or family), sleeping in vehicles or abandoned buildings where they would not have been enumerated, camping in remote areas that would be difficult or unsafe to be reached by the street count volunteer teams, or living outside of the geographic areas that are surveyed as a part of the street count.

Other complementary research, undertaken by the Interagency Committee for the Absolute Homeless, has attempted to give a more complete annual picture of homelessness in Calgary. The Interagency Committee for the Absolute Homeless used client data collected in 2000 and 2002 by a number of shelters1 in Calgary to track full year utilization across the shelter system. This study indicated that in 2000, 11,000 different individuals were housed by these shelters, increasing to 14,181 individuals in 2002 (Perras and Huyder, 2003). While more current annual shelter utilization data is not available, these numbers provide an indication of the actual magnitude of homelessness in Calgary in addition to the one-night snapshot offered by the Biennial Count of Homeless Persons.

That’s 11,000 people at the turn of the century. Sorry for the long quote, but I felt it was important. A recent report by the City of Calgary pegs the number at 16,000 people at present who have no place to stay. I am using this number as a benchmark to eyeball a back of the envelope calculation.

Now the actual count pegs the number at 3,500 in 2006, but word on the street is that there has been about a 50% increase in the homeless over the past three months. So let’s set a minimum of roughly 5,500 people bare minimum on the street we can count pretty well directly from here. Our maximum number is 16,000. That’s a hell of a statistical window. The error bars on this thing are going to be huge. So, right off the bat, we have a possible error of 50%. Let’s go on.

Checking the site for the Canadian Mental Health Association, http://www.cmha.ca/bins/index.asp, we have a statement right off the bat that 70% of all homeless people are mentally ill. This estimate falls in line with the federal minister of health who pegs the percentage at 50%. Remember, this is ball park and the error bars are huge. But hell, that never slowed me down before and I don’t think it should now.

There’s another recent report by the city on a long range plan to attack homelessness that takes the high estimate of the number of homeless but states that about 25% are severely mentally ill. So we have another fairly wide statistical window here. We’re between 25% and 70% of the homeless are mentally ill. I guess it depends on the ranking of the illness. Of course there is no mention in any of the reports on who, exactly, is deciding on who is mentally ill and how mentally ill are they. The City report, hmmmm where is it? Ah, here it is:

http://www.calgary.ca/docgallery/bu/cns/homelessness/background_research_10_year_plan_end_homelessness.pdf

(I’ve called it damn near everything you ever wanted to know about homelessness.)

OK, we’ll take 25% severely mentally ill. We’ll take another 25% really sick and maybe a top end of 20% who are trying to make their way but could still be classified as mentally ill. It’s a conjecture.

So, let’s put this together: Max, 16000 homeless, min 5,500. Hell, make the minimum 4,000 and spread the error bar a little. That makes between 16,000 and 4,000 homeless. Of those, between 25% and 70% are mentally ill. At the bottom we have a bare minimum of 1,000 people who are severely mentally ill on the streets of Calgary. At the top end we have a maximum of 11,200 mentally ill on the street; call it 10,000 between friends.

That’s a hockey sock full of people! You mean to say, there are anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 people who are talking to the fairies, homeless, and with little or no access to any sort of viable treatment? Yup. There’s a bare minimum of 1,000 people, severely mentally ill, holed up somewhere, strewn about the city. There are roughly 5,000 to 10,000 who are messed up, also with no place to go. And winter is coming on.

Next question, how many are self medicating or using street drugs? Insp. Bob Ritchie who rides herd on the downtown core, says it’s a lot. The city’s panning and research department says it’s 50%. The feds say it’s 10% and I have a similar number as the feds with the CMHA. Check their site.

Long story short: there’s an absolute bare minimum of 500 people without access to real help, who are not doing drugs and are severely mentally ill. Nyaaaaah, ballpark about … ummm … what the heck, call it 4,000 or 5,000 druggies maximum who are really messed up. Whether they are messed up because of the drugs or were messed up and turned to drugs is a point in question.

So there is a basic idea of the size of the problem. It’s a big ball park, but certainly not outside our ability to handle it. In a city of a million people, we’re talking in the neighborhood of 10,000 in trouble. Doing the math, that’s one percent of the population that we have to carry. We can do that. Now let’s get down to how we can solve this problem.

About this site

Hi. I've just finished writing an interview with the police officer in charge of the downtown area. It's called Interview with the Man. It basically verifies the obvious. I've written some other pieces about being homeless and mentally ill in Calgary, which, I imagine, is pretty well the same as any other city. I've tried Vlogging and I can tell you that writers make lousy videos. I'm gong to have to keep doing it and hope it gets better. I also have to figure out how to lay out these pages and make them easier to get around. I'm new at this so please be patient.

Just to let you know I've also added links about homelessness. This thing's been studied to death and still no end in sight. An intersting problem indeed.

Now, I'm working on trying to figure out just how many people are mentally ill and homeless in Calgary. It's not that straightforward. We can all get some idea of the depth of this problem simply by gong out onto the street and looking around. It's obvious we have a problem, but let's just see how big the problem is.

Interview with the Man

A couple of weeks ago I had a chat with Insp. Bob Ritchie. He’s the Calgary Police officer in charge of Division One – the downtown core. It took a little bit to set up the phone interview, but it’s not that hard. The Calgary Police are pretty good about disseminating information, but they’re busy as hell and it takes a little time to get to you – especially if they haven’t a clue what you’re on about.

First thing I wanted to know was if there was a proactive program for homelessness or the mentally ill on the street.

“If it’s a police matter then its reactive policing,” he asserted, “We have no proactive policing. When all other sources become not available, it is a police problem.”

Well, that answers that question. About homelessness:

“It requires a multilayered approach,” he said, “It requires the medical community, judicial, social agencies, politicians and emergency services.

“Policing is a last resort,” he continued, “sometimes a criminal element is present, but not always.

“You see, the homeless are forced into criminal or bylaw issues. The boom is increasing our problems. There’s an increased working poor population.”

(In case you’ve just tuned into the planet, Calgary is sitting on huge reserves of oil and overnight exploded with work and people pouring in from all over the world. This is the biggest boom Calgary has ever seen -- and it’s seen some whoppers in the past.)

“We’re very cognizant of this,” he explained, “We have to maintain good working relationships with the community.”

He mentioned various groups: CUPS, Alpha, DOAP, (Downtown Outreach Addictions Partnership), He said they rely heavily on social partnerships and the health care community, which makes sense. I mean, if the police didn’t cooperate with health and emergency services, we’d be totally up the creek without a paddle. He said there are lots of other organizations and apologized for not mentioning all of them. I told him not to worry about it, I can Google them.

One thing of note he mentioned. The judicial system in the past two years has developed a mental health diversion program. It goes like this: if officers in a criminal investigation find themselves in a mental health situation, and under the Mental Health Act, they can actually decide what constitutes a mental health situation; they can refer to the courts to track them instead of it resulting in a criminal conviction. They can refer the matter to a mental health situation, the court steps in and tracks the person arrested, and the person can get some help. It’s a hell of a way to get help, but at least it’s something.

He also mentioned that the police have psychiatrists on staff. He said they don’t go out into the community or anything, but they do have shrinks on staff. That may come in handy.

I was on the National Task Force for Resourcing for the RCMP for a number of years and we had to mathematically model, in considerable detail, the way policing works. I can tell you in no uncertain terms, that if you’re just into reactive policing with no proactive plans in place, you are playing catch-up ball. It’s a loser’s game. If you start winning, they move the goalposts and you have to work twice as hard just to stay even.

So there you have it. We’re putting out fires like crazy and it can only get worse. Time to head over to the library and check out some numbers. Just how big is this problem anyway?

By the River

Reactions

Interesting.

I have no idea where this project will go. I'm just moving forward as best as possible. Already I have received an email from a reader who read my piece on what is it like to be mentally ill in Calgary and the reader confessed that they were about to cash in their chips. They read my piece and were moved to write to me. I'm very touched and honoured. I replied, after reading what they wrote, and that things always get better. I know it's tripe and things can always get worse, but eventually, they pick up. Really bad situations don't last that long. If you really feel like it's the end, I wrote, then get to a hospital -- fast.

A very good friend of mine a number of years back was seriously considering ending it. It's the big "S" word. I set off to get to her and told her to get to the psych ward as fast as possible in the meantime. By the time I got there, she had taken the couageous step of walking up to the emergency intake counter and demanding to see the psychiatric emergency response team.

"I want the psychiatric emergency response team right now or else I'm going to kill myself!" she said.

"Man," she said later, "do those guys ever move fast!"

Of course she was pumped up with meds, secured to a bed, counselled, visited by a shrink and had a program of future therapy lined up for her. This all happened in about an hour or so. She was in the hospital for less than a week, I think. She started straightenning out her life as far as financial assistance was concerned and sticks to her meds and regularly visits her shrink for sessions. That was a few years ago. She's on her feet now and would be, what I would call, recovered. There is hope for everyone.

Now, I'm not a shrink or qualified in any way to deal with mental illness. I have had a little conselling training which is totally inadequate. If you like you can email me and I'll try to email back. If you are seriously thinking of ending it or you are hearing voices, (and you know what I mean by that), then get to a hospital. Don't self-medicate or think you can cure yourself or that you're not worth saving or no one cares. We actually have a very good health system if you can get into it. It's stressed past the breaking point but filled with awesome dedicated people, so don't abuse it. But if you're face to face with the big "S" or you're hearing voices run, do not walk, to the nearest clinic or hospital.

Sitting in a coffeeshop

It was a hot day yesterday in downtown Calgary. It ended with a massive thunder and hail storm that shut down the city. But in the afternoon it was a hot summer day in the swelter of Seventh Avenue.
The police were out in force patrolling the street. Five of them conferred on the corner of Seventh and Centre. They busted an old man on a bicycle. That’s important. We’ll get back to old men on bicycles peddling downtown. Then they busted a couple of girls, each in their twenties. They searched them, let one go and ticketed the other. Then they split up.
A couple of the cops came into the coffee shop. They were very hot and sweating. The tall blonde one took off his hat at the counter and you could tell he was suffering from the heat. He got his coffee; it looked like a latte, and came over to the table next to me and sat down, waiting for his partner.
“You look a little hot,” I said to him.
He chuckled. He had a good clean kind of smile, one that took up most of his face.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“It must be rough in those black uniforms. Maybe they should put you guys in shorts,” I said.
“Hah, I don’t think that’ll happen, but it’s a good idea,” he said.
“How long have you been doing the downtown beat?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve been on the beat for about five years now,” he said. “I’ve been doing downtown for around a year now.”
“It must have been tough last winter,” I said. “There looked like a lot of people on the street in the cold. Some of them didn’t make it.”
The smile left his face. “It was hard,” he said, “You see, when it comes to the homeless, we deal with three different groups of people. We deal with those with mental problems (he shrugged) and we can’t do anything for them. We deal with the working poor and we deal with those who have severe addictions.
“The working poor aren’t that much of a problem,” he continued, “I mean; you’re not gong to find one of them in a doorway smoking crack.
“But the addicts … what Calgarians don’t know,” he said, stabbing the air with his finger for emphasis, “is that their habit costs $200 a day. They have to get that money. They break into cars. They break into people’s homes. They’ll do anything to get that money.”
He took a sip on his coffee. He made sense. He made perfect sense. Social scientists say the homeless are all mentally ill. Others say people are homeless because of a lack of affordable housing. But here we have a cop on the beat for a year, who brings a lot of light to a dark and confused issue.
He says there are three groups. We don’t know how many are in each group mind you, but at least we have clear lines of demarcation. There are those with mental problems, who we ignore; those who work hard, but are poor; and the addicts, who we keep busting.
So, for the working poor, there is obviously no affordable housing. Those with mental problems, there is no hope, and for the druggies, they’re on the street from a very bad choice made some time ago.
The cop put down his mug and was joined by his partner. They talked shop for a bit.
During a lull, I asked, “Do you think someone would be mentally ill after sucking on a crack pipe for a couple of years?”
The same cop thought a moment, “I don’t know,” he said, “Most of them are pretty lucid. They’re pretty intelligent. They’re smart. The way they talk, they don’t seem mentally ill, but I don’t know …
“The military uses sleep deprivation to torture people,” he went on, “Lack of sleep is a form of torture. These guys go on a binge for two or three days and you can tell it really takes it out of them physically.”
He flashed another one of his smiles. It seemed to be hiding a world of experiences.
The two got up and put on their hats once again. Coffee break’s over, back to work. We said goodbye.

Homeless mentally ill

What’s it like to be mentally ill in Calgary?

It is a dark and reasonably warm night by the river. The lights of the city look crisp and clean against the dark black/blue sky speckled with the odd star. The full moon is reflected in the muddy flowing water up onto the bank. You can look out across the river by the bridge into the downtown, the huge buildings and their lights neatly stacked in columns and rows peering from black rectangular, tall shapes. It is safe crouched under the bush in the park overlooking the river.

In front of you, on the edge of the bank, silhouetted against the flashing reflection of the moon in the river is the tree, a small cedar, about three feet tall. You can look through the tree to the flowing water, but tonight it is calling to you. The tree is the focal point of the universe. It has a message for you. It is one with the universe and you are one with the tree. It talks to you, not so much in words, but in feelings and thoughts that are beyond words. There is no need for words. The communication is far too sacred and direct. There is a full and complete connection between the universe, the tree and your mind. It is very beautiful. The smell is as clean as a brand new razor. The lights are crisp. The colours of the tree, the river, the bush, the stars, lights and the total night are so real, they cannot be described.

It’s a light-headed feeling. The tree and its message are hypnotic. The night passes slowly. The traffic dies down and you are truly alone. It begins to cool and then get colder. You shudder, couching and clutching yourself for a little warmth. A slight drizzle begins. You have to protect your family – the children. There was a wife so many years ago. You could get to them and tell them the message. But they wouldn’t listen; they wouldn’t understand. It has been so long. You remember them but they probably don’t remember you. It’s cold. There were the children, your family, trying to care for them, going from job to job, trying to make a living, trying to be a decent human being. You could never make it. You never got a break. You had to go on your mission, to find your path, to discover your destiny. Things would be all right then. They would love you then.

The night is colder. The mist turns to rain. Cold, wet and shivering you huddle under this bush. Where is your family now? Where are the ones you love? It has been years. You have no one. This small tree talking to you in the night is your only friend, the only friend you have in the world. You are gripped by the pangs of an incredible and all-consuming loneliness and you cry. Where are they? Where are they? You clutch yourself and curl up in a ball of self pity. You roll onto your side and weep uncontrollably. And there is no one to hear you. No one except a small tree.