Years ago, when I was in social work, I had occasion to go into local homeless shelters a time or two, and I left with neither a bad impression or good impression. The staff there seemed helpful and compassionate if not overwhelmed, and the accommodations were spartan and utilitarian but not squalid.
Have any Dopers ever had to spend time in a homeless shelter? What’s is really like?
I will take kids to a homeless shelter to eat from time to time. Teaches them about people who have less than they do.
And the atmosphere at these places borders on a prison environment. LOTS of rules and people enforcing them. The people are friendly. The staff can get quite nasty with a quickness if you violate any of those rules.
Other than that, lots of people around. Plenty of food. Very clean - plenty of people to chip in and do work. Lots of volunteers and these people are quite wonderful!
I am a veteran of the Fort Washington Men’s shelter (168th St @ 7th AVe, Manhattan) and the no-longer-extant Queens Men’s Shelter (Hillside and Winchester Ave, Queens Village).
This is from back in the 1980s.
The city made some effort to render services to us collectively but didn’t have the resources to pay attention to us individually. I remember thinking it was like someone letting in stray cats and feeding them and chasing them out the next morning.
In 1984 the few programs that provided actual services were targeted to specific populations. One such population was the “homeless mentally ill” and I was advised to cash in on my psychiatric history and I did so. Most of the services provided were utter crap, as far as I was concerned, but the following essential things made a huge difference:
• I had a room, with a locker to hold my stuff, which I could leave and return to later and stuff would (generally) still be in it. In contrast to Fort Washington where no such service was provided. That meant not having to take with me every article of clothing that I owned. It meant I could have pieces of paper with essential info written on them and could leave them behind in my locker.
• I could receive mail. I previously had some friends holding mail for me but it wasn’t convenient.
• They had laundry facilities and I could wash my clothes for free.
• Once I got myself enrolled in college (which was accepted as my required “rehab program”) they provided me with transportation to get to school —subway tokens that the bus system accepted. I got myself into the college, qualifying for financial aid up the wazoo due to > 1 year NY residence + utter lack of income + being old enough they couldn’t treat my parents’ income as relevant.
Yeah, we were treated a lot like people in a prison; restrictions for the sake of restrictions, nasty attitudes, violence from the security guards, etc.
I have to admit I’m a touch curious. You are a long term (17 years) poster who has been very forthcoming and generous with your time in detailing your experiences (often harrowing) with the mental illness industrial complex in the US. You seem to have been mentally rock solid (at least in terms of your posting content) for almost 2 decades now. Do you still define yourself as having a “mental illness” or is that all past history for you at this point?
for two weeks me and family lived at a salvation army shelter in the early 80s in san bernadino my mom were helping relatives run a hotel and when relatives and owners got into it they just kicked us all out
it was a thing where you left after breakfast and came back about 3:30 or so they gave you a sack lunch which was a pb&j sandwich milk and an apple or banana on the way out
most of the staff was nice except for one old guy who got grouchy if the kids made too much noise but handed out candy right before bed time
The food was edible (the kids could eat as much as they wanted really ) and it had the air of an hospital really although they made a rule that I couldn’t sleep in the top bunk as I fell out once or twice
we finally found a house back in good ol Lancaster and that’s where weve been for the most part …
and that’s why although I don’t agree with a lot of the salvation armys doctrine I donate every year
We got a bologna sandwich with a mustard pack and a small pack of chips. Don’t recall anything else.
I have never, at any point, defined myself as having a “mental illness”.
I am a person who was diagnosed as mentally ill. Note the difference.
Was I really? Is anyone, ever? Isn’t it a cliche to go around saying “they made a mistake, I wasn’t mentally ill”? At hearings to determine whether one should be allowed to refuse psychiatric treatment it is common for the psychiatrist to say that your failure to comprehend that you are mentally ill shows how ill you are. Can a mind, as opposed to a brain or some other physical organ, “be ill” anyway? Is “illness” when applied to a mind a sort of metaphor, like saying someone who has no morals is suffering from a sickness of the soul or something?
I chose not to engage with that. I figured maybe I am different or maybe they made a mistake, but there’s no way to make that determination. You know what they put on your chart if you do not appear to manifest the mental illness with which you were once diagnosed? “Schizophrenia in remission”, or equivalent for other diagnoses. The functional, de facto definition of being mentally ill is that you’ve been diagnosed as such. There’s no rebuttal really.
Well, except that there is. My line on it is that I may or may not be neurologically or neurochemically (etc) different, but “illness” is a value judgment. And I like who I am. And how I am. And my opinion is the main one that counts. So I say that I am schizophrenic but that in my case, at any rate, it’s a difference that I’m proud of, and I have the right to remain schizophrenic, and uncured and untreated, because it isn’t a disease or illness if it isn’t undesirable.
If you want to know my opinion on whether or not I had, or do have, impairments, you won’t get a single simple answer. What got me my diagnosis was trying to come out at the University of New Mexico in 1980, as a genderqueer person. Well, except that in 1980 there was no such word. There are people today who think I have no legitimate gender-identity concern, that I have some kind of sick twisted need for attention, ego-compensation for being a boring person or some such thing, that genderqueer is bullshit, especially if the person in question is not interested in doing a medical transition to the other sex. (and they have said so on this and some other message boards that I frequent). Do I know for sure they aren’t right?
… no… not for absolute certainty, how could I?
And even if the gender stuff is exactly as I describe it, well, it marginalized me, I got subjected to stuff, so maybe it kind of messed me up, ok? Maybe I’m damaged goods in various ways.
I do not believe there is a known understood medical phenomenon called “schzophrenia” (or, for that matter, bipolar disorder or depression etc etc). I think there are some recurrent patterns. I do not think the psychiatric establishment knows much more than it did in 1885 what these patterns actually represent. They’ve invested very heavily in a biomedical explanation that research has failed to support. Many of them mean well but I regard them as quacks, akin to the medical folks in the 1700s who believed in the four humouirs and went around bleeding their patients.
But even if we dismiss them as charlatans, there’s still the general notion of being, well, you know, nuts. Not all there in the head. Am I? You seem to think not, at least based on my participation on the board. I’ll take that as a vote of confidence, thank you. But seriously, if I’m not at all nuts or neurotic or whatever you wanna call it, then I am a person who harbors a lot of peculiar ideas not widely shared and not quickly adopted by others when I try to explain them. And at least a goodly chunk of those can’t coexist as equally correct ideas alongside of those embraced by the general public. Someone sometimes has to be wrong, if not necessarily messed up in the head, and I can’t afford the luxury of not remembering that it could be me, if you see what I mean.
When I was on the locked ward, the other patients there didn’t seem particularly nutty to me. Their behavior made a lot more sense than the behaviors of the staff.
I think tensions and pressures and situations make a person’s mind do things, get distorted a bit. I think isolation and alienation are among those tensions. So anyone under the appropriate circumstances becomes schizophrenic, or begins careening in a bipolar pattern, or becomes depressed. Not a disease, just a condition that a person ends up in some of the time. I might be wrong about that but that’s what I think. Make of it what you will.
Your explanation puts things in a different light and requires a different perspective from the disease centered paradigm we usually use in considering mental illness. I think you are correct in a lot of the things you say about the nature of labeling and classifying non-typical behavior so we can get a conceptual handle on it.