As a young student in CEGEP (in Quebec, we replace the last year of high school and the first of university with an intermediate general college system called CEGEPs), I took a course called Poverty in Montreal.
I thought it was a joke at first. I had grown up watching starving children in Biafra with matchstick legs and bloated bellies. At the time, that was my understanding of poverty. The idea that poverty had different faces, and that some of them could be found in our own backyards, never even crossed my mind until I took that course.
As an assignment, I spent a night in a Salvation Army men’s hostel. I came across many other forms of poverty that night. Not the type caused by food shortages or civil wars, but the kinds caused by mental illness.
Thanks to that course, and armed with my subsequent experience as a psychologist, I can now look back to that day with a much clearer, and more personal, understanding of homelessness.
A full third of the homeless suffer from schizophrenia (one in five with the disease live on the streets). Of the rest, many have grown up in abusive or neglectful conditions. Others have seen their lives ruined by substances. Some may suffer from Asperger’s syndrome or other neurodevelopmental problems. Regardless of the exact nature of their difficulties, very few of them are not touched by mental illness.
For last week’s Metro column, I wrote about that assignment.
My homeless experience (Source: Une journée avec les sans abri, Journal Métro, May 6, 2008)
When I was a CEGEP student I took a course called Poverty in Montreal. We were given the option of doing some field observation and giving a lecture to the class instead of writing a term paper. I jumped at the opportunity to avoid another written assignment. On my teacher’s suggestion I decided to spend a night at the Salvation Army Men’s Hostel. He told me that that the people I met there would surprise me. He wasn’t kidding.
I let my baby-face stubble grow out for a few days, threw on a lumberjack shirt, grabbed my father’s old army knapsack, and took the metro downtown. When I arrived at the hostel, I paid one dollar for a cot in one of the dorms.
I spent an afternoon and evening among an odd collection of men, each with a unique story to tell. I met an old man who told me a long nonsensical story about New Orleans, a young man whose bravado seemed to belie a life led mostly on the streets, and a former businessman who had been married with two children and a successful career before his life fell apart. He only shared a small glimpse of the course of events that beat him down and brought him to the hostel, but his was the story that touched me the most.
After many years of working with the mentally ill at the Douglas Institute, I can now look back to that day and revisit each story with a new understanding. I now know that one-third of the homeless suffer from schizophrenia. Was the old man an untreated case? Most likely. Was the young man a typical runaway escaping from neglect or abuse at home or in youth protection? And the businessman, did he suffer from a bipolar depression or other mental illness, or was he simply broken by events around him? I can’t say for sure, but I’m certain of one thing; their stories were the tip of the iceberg.
When it came time to sleep. I took my spot on a cot in a room with at least a dozen others. The room smelled of vomit and a variety of body odors. The snoring and the constant interruptions from late arrivers didn’t help. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep. I just stared at the ceiling and waited for the sun to rise. I then slipped out and headed for the metro where I had to kill another twenty minutes before the first train was scheduled to arrive. Unlike the new friends I left behind and the other homeless men at the hostel, I, at least, was able to escape that life.
My experience that day taught me many things about homelessness and mental illness. The most important one being that these people do not deserve to be ignored or forgotten.
Tagged as homelessness, mental illness, poverty, Schizophrenia.
Posted in Mental health.
Posted on 12 May 2008
