Columbia’s War on Poverty: Homelessness, mental health issues often go hand in hand
May is officially Mental Health Awareness Month and it seems like a good time to give some thought to mental health in the homeless community. Believe me, running a homeless shelter like we do at The Salvation Army, we see an awful lot of folks who need mental health care.
For example, writing this column, I can’t help but think about the time not too long ago that we had an overnight resident commit suicide. It was freezing outside and the gentleman was just an overnight resident, getting inside out of the cold, so we really did not know too much about him. We would have known more if he had been a full resident, staying for as long as 90 days or more, when he would have had regular meetings with a case worker and other support.
It is very possible that we could not have saved him if the man had been a resident, but we would have had a better chance. We almost certainly could have identified that there was a mental health issue, and we would have been better positioned to try to help him. It breaks my heart that we were not able to. It breaks my heart that far too many people facing homelessness also live with mental health issues.
A 2015 survey by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that 250,000 people living homeless had some form of mental illness and at least 140,000 were seriously mentally ill at any given time (of 564,708 people living homeless). Can you imagine? These are pretty big numbers; this is a lot of folks who need our help with their mental health.
In my case, for just almost any mental health issue, I have a support system of family and friends that would rush to my aid and make sure I have whatever I might need. But what if I didn’t? This is yet another reason why we know that pretty much anybody could find themselves living homeless.
Sure, you are smart and work hard and would do whatever you need to do to provide for yourself and your family, but what if you lived with schizophrenia? What if you found yourself living with depression so debilitating that you could barely get out of bed?
For any number of reasons – with mental health being just one of them – we are all much closer to finding ourselves living homeless than we would like to believe. We should keep this in mind when we see men and women living homeless here in Columbia. We should remember that far too many are in desperate need of mental health care.
Let’s think about this just a little more during May, Mental Health Awareness Month. Let’s think about what our neighbors might be facing and what they might need. Let’s remember that it could pretty easily be us or someone we love.
Major Kevin Cedervall is a leader of The Salvation Army in Columbia. The Salvation Army provides a wide range of community services to address poverty and other issues, seeking to rebuild lives and create lasting change.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Columbia’s War on Poverty: Mental health often tied to homelessness
