The situation with the homeless is a frustrating one but as my friend Gar Mickelson explains, a much more complicated problem than we think.

I often wondered when I was in the thick of dealing with my PTSD, when will I be the one out on the streets? How far will my friends and family support me before they decide they really can't help me. There were times I felt it wasn't out of the question for me to be there, and if that day came, what would that look like?

Yes, there are some people that choose to be homeless, there are some that got hooked on drugs and ended up there, but a lot of people that are homeless were stricken with a mental illness from birth, or an accident, or from incredible amounts of trauma that they went through in their life.

The real question isn't how should we treat the drug-addicted homeless, the real question is, how should we treat our mentally ill that are living on the streets? What will they say about us in 20, 30 or 40 years when looking at the way we dealt with mental illness. We shut down a majority of the mental hospitals between the '50s and '90s because our parents and grandparents said it was too cruel to treat the mentally ill that way. How is our conscience so callus compared to theirs? What story are we telling ourselves when seeing a fellow human being covered in filth and feces manically repeating aloud what is ringing incessantly in their heads.

"You will be judged by how you treat the least among you."

-Jesus

Mental Illness and People That Are Homeless

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