Tuesday, May 10, 2005
No place to go.
PBS Frontline will air the Documentary "The New Asylums" on Tuesday, May 10 at 9PM. This episode examines the issue of the mentally ill in prisons and jails, with the Ohio state prison system as its primary focus. Please refer to the Frontline Website for more information.
Source: Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness
According to Science Daily, a University of California-San Diego study has recently shown that there are more mentally ill people who are homeless than previously thought. And this is not surprising. The way deinstitutionalization has been handled most of the time is one of the major causes of the explosion of the homeless problem. In the meetings and discussions I've participated in regarding homelessness, deinstitutionalization is a theme that comes up a lot, in addition to the relative lack of health care options for the uninsured.
The fact is, social services agencies are in most cases poorly equipped to deal with the mentally ill. Cutting back on services to the mentally ill and forcing them to depend on general social service organizations which are not equipped to give them the help they need is neither logical nor humane. The fact that recent mental health reform efforts in North Carolina seem to be flawed is merely an invitation to worsening the problem of homelessness as agencies such as the IFC get swamped with clients they are not equipped to help.
Here's a personal testimony from one man who was once homeless and mentally ill in New York City. Words such as "deranged" and "psychos" are often used to depict these people, inflammatory language that could not be used against other groups in our society without political and legal repercussions.
-# posted by Michael McGee @ 3:19 PM
