Homeless mentally ill

Hi. I am getting interesting emails from different people all over the place. Here is a project for homeless people in New Hampshire. It is run by a professional psychologist named Cindy and it is call the Under the Bridge Project. They have very little to work with but at least it's something. India has at least something. We have a drop-in centre and some beds that are overcrowded. We have no one that I know of who is working with the mentally ill. Here, as in almost all other places, there is no access to medical care for the mentally ill on the street.

Here's something Cindy sent me:

The Under the Bridge Project

Since 1998 The UTB outreach team has attended to the needs of the unsheltered homeless in Manchester. Our volunteers collect usable goods from community resources to redistribute. We also provide advocacy and referrals. We receive help with our goals through community members who respond responsibly to help us address immediate needs and God's Providence.

The Dance of Outreach

Outreach is primarily directed toward finding homeless people who might not use services due to lack of awareness or active avoidance and who would otherwise be ignored or underserved.

Outreach is viewed as a process rather than an outcome, with a focus on establishing rapport and a goal of eventually engaging people in the services they will accept.

Outreach is first and foremost a process of relationship building and that is where the dance begins...

Outreach by peers, meaning "children of God" forgoing the titles or degrees, is an essential connection for the ignored, abused or otherwise sheltered and unsheltered and the formerly homeless.

Outreach connects us to one another, places care and humanity into our own hands and builds community amongst us.

Outreach with our peers is non-judgmental. It builds understanding it values programs that work and steers clear of those that don't. Outreach by peers doesn't waste time. It doesn't pass out bus tickets to other towns and it doesn't let people starve because of their "inappropriate behavior" which may have put them out of shelters, nor do they freeze in bad weather.

Outreach by peers, allows baby steps and coaxes when appropriate the step toward the hospital, the rehab, the shelter, and mental health. It doesn't side step real issues and, can confront when needed

And Outreach is to dance with grace, when the stakes are high as the challenge for all of us.

Bruce We also help plan annual Gimme shelter which is a sleep-out on our state capital- file attached. we work with colleges and churches to raise awareness. we get people experiencing homelessness that we have met to attend and speak and for at least one night thaty have a place to sleep without getting woken up and told to move on or be arrested.

and we annually plan Homeless memorial day vigils as we keep track of street deaths and help community grieve as other families would.

. there is awesome national group website where you can get lots of ideas.

nationalhomeless.org

peace, gotta work the streets as you know its getting cold and need to stock up folks with blankets and coats

cindy

--
"... everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence." Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket), Salish.

It's been a while people. I have been busy beyond description. We ended up evicted because my wife and I are looking after our disabled brother. He's not mentally ill, he has Downs Syndrome. Such is the society in which we live. Life goes on.

I received an email from India. Sarbani works with the homeless mentally ill in Kolkata. It looks like it's his job. That's more than we have going here. We have people working with the homeless, but no one specifically working with the mentally ill on the streets. India's ahead of us on that one. Here's the email he sent:

We started this work one and a half years back. There are around 466 homeless mentally ill on the streets of Kolkata. Right now running from pillar to post to raise some funds for the hospitalization cost for emergency cases. Its tough. But worth trying.

He sent the following link: Stuff in India click here.

He also sent some pics of news articles. Here they are ...

I wish they weren't so blurred so they were easier to read. The top one is about a young man who was found naked and babbling prayers rummaging through garbage. He was taken to a hospital and under the care of a psychiatrist, found a road to recovery. He has a long way to go, but at least he is getting treatment that seems to be working.

The second article talks about 18 mentally ill people who were found living on a railroad platform. They were taken to a judge who sent them to a hospital. They didn't have any room for them there and they were rejected. They went back to the judge and he sent them to a doctor. The doc said only one of them was ill and the rest were rejected. The clinic revealed they simply didn't have the facilities for them. No one knows what to do with them or how to keep them.

Sarbani says he just keeps working on, with nothing and little or no help. But at least it's better than what we do.

I began this blog as an investigation into the causes of social problems. I wanted to find out why nothing worked in our society any more. Here we have a problem that is epidemic throughout the world. This problem of homeless mentally ill people is everywhere. And here we have pretty good evidence that almost nothing is being done about it. At least in India, it's being examined. Here, it's being ignored. I am not a sociologist or a shrink; I'm a mathematician mostly. I am trying to model social problems and look at it mathematically. I have come to a few conclusions on the causes of having 1,000 to 5,000 homeless mentally ill people, who are very sick and suffering, living on the banks of the Bow River in Calgary, one of the riches cities in the world. It would cost very little to cure the problem in fairly short order with a commitment to actually solving the problem. In other words, with integrity. However, we spend much more to manage the problem; it just keeps going. It's destroying our downtown and killing business after business in the central core. Recently, Sears moved out of the downtown. A huge multi story building has been emptied by Sears. I don't know if anything has taken over to fill the void. The Bay is probably next, and if the Bay goes, there goes downtown Calgary.

So, what's my conclusion, and what the heck is it about that stone? Well, it goes like this, I'm concluding the reason we're in this situation, is because we have built a society where people would rather keep their jobs than do them. We have an army of bureaucrats and accountants and no one to do the work. In Calgary, there is one psychiatrist working for Access Mental Health who is assigned to the homeless. He works a couple of days a week, a couple of hours a day. And that's for over 1,000 very sick people. He works out of an office. You need an appointment and have to go through a screening to see him. You fill out a form. You wait for a phone call and two separate phone interviews from screeners. If you're lucky, you can see him in a couple of months. So, if you're mentally ill, homeless, have the where with all to keep it together for a while and have a cell phone -- hey, you're in luck!

It's based on the difference between our perception of the problem and the reality of the problem. Which is why I keep harping on Truth all the time. There's a huge difference between our perception and reality. People who believe their perception happens to be reality are people who are mentally ill. Those of us who strive to come closer to reality and overcome their assumptions and perceptions, are those who are a lot closer to good mental health. In other words, to get right down to it, we have built a society which has lost it's fundamental integrity. It is inherently corrupt.

A couple of weeks ago, the federal minister of health lambasted a conference of physicians over the drug shoot-up havens provided for in Vancouver. He based his condemnation of the bevy of doctors on the simple fact that what they were doing was simply morally wrong. It was a wrong thing to do to provide access to the poison that was killing their patients when they could, in fact, actually heal them. It's a step forward. There may be arguments against him, but his premise is sound. There has to be someone, somewhere, who is willing to take the moral high ground and damn the consequences; let's heal people, lots of people. We don't need more bureaucrats or accountants; we need people on the street getting the job done.