Homeless Mentally Ill

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.

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

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