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
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
The first document I went through was the count of the homeless in
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
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
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:
(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
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.
1 comment:
Thanks for revealing your ideas.
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