Up All Night--Part 2

As I mentioned the other day, I went out with the police the other night. The cops tried to talk homeless people into coming into emergency shelters because it was the coldest night of the year. With wind chill it was maybe 15 to 20 degrees, plenty cold by Seattle standards. And no weather to be sleeping out in. The homeless die on the streets all the time in this city, not in huge numbers but enough to where it bugs you just knowing about it. Not far from where I live, an old woman died in snowbank in a parking lot two years ago.

This was the first big push made by the city in years to keep people from dying in plain sight. The cop I rode with for 6 hours that night, a veteran of 27 years, said he was glad to see it. He knew the streets and where the homeless secret themselves at night.

I won't detail too much of what I saw, since I was doing this in a work-related capacity. But it's just staggering and humbling seeing what's up out there. Mentally-ill folks everywhere without even a proper shot at deciding whether or not they want to be floating around in the snake pit of the streets. President Bush says he wants to end homelessness in this country within 10 years. He took a key step in enacting his policy this month. He slashed the annual budgets for Medicaid--that's where health care comes from for the poor--and public housing, funding needed to build the housing in which to place the homeless. Cocksucker. But whatever. Clinton was just as big a fool on homelessness. Reagan was damn near the devil. But that's for another day.

All I am doing here is finding a long way to say that if America truly wants to end homelessness, then it needs to properly address mental illness in this society. About 50 percent of the homeless are estimated to have some kind of mental illness (no, I am not counting substance abuse here). That works out to about 1 million to 1.5 million people. I only wish I knew all the things could fix matters for that many people. I do know a few things, however.

We need to get treatment that works and is not life-reducing for patients, otherwise patients aren't too likely to stick with treatment. We need to end the moronic stigma around mental illness. We need to make grappling with mental illness as easy as grappling with a heart attack. We need to address this most acutely among men. They are the ones who end up offing themselves or living homeless on the streets in the greatest numbers by far.