It's Been a While - a podcast by Bruce Rout

It's been a while people. I have been busy beyond description. We ended up evicted because my wife and I are looking after our disabled brother. He's not mentally ill, he hasDownsSyndrome. Such is the society in which we live. Life goes on.

I received an email from India.Sarbaniworks with the homeless mentally ill inKolkata. It looks like it's his job. That's more than we have going here. We have people working with the homeless, but no one specifically working with the mentally ill on the streets. India's ahead of us on that one. Here's the email he sent:

We started this work one and a half years back. There are around 466 homeless mentally ill on the streets ofKolkata. Right now running from pillar to post to raise some funds for the hospitalization cost for emergency cases. Its tough. But worth trying.

He sent the following link:Stuff in India click here.

He also sent some pics of news articles. Here they are ...


I wish they weren't so blurred so they were easier to read. The top one is about a young man who was found naked and babbling prayers rummaging through garbage. He was taken to a hospital and under the care of a psychiatrist, found a road to recovery. He has a long way to go, but at least he is getting treatment that seems to be working.

The second article talks about 18 mentally ill people who were found living on a railroad platform. They were taken to a judge who sent them to a hospital. They didn't have any room for them there and they were rejected. They went back to the judge and he sent them to a doctor. The doc said only one of them was ill and the rest were rejected. The clinic revealed they simply didn't have the facilities for them. No one knows what to do with them or how to keep them.

Sarbanisays he just keeps working on, with nothing and little or no help. But at least it's better than what we do.

I began this blog as an investigation into the causes of social problems. I wanted to find out why nothing worked in our society any more. Here we have a problem that is epidemic throughout the world. This problem ofhomelessmentally ill people is everywhere. And here we have pretty good evidence that almost nothing is being done about it. At least in India, it's being examined. Here, it's being ignored. I am not a sociologist or a shrink; I'm a mathematician mostly. I am trying to model social problems and look at it mathematically. I have come to a few conclusions on the causes of having 1,000 to 5,000 homeless mentally ill people, who are very sick and suffering, living on the banks of the Bow River in Calgary, one of the riches cities in the world. It would cost very little to cure the problem in fairly short order with acommitmentto actually solving the problem. In other words, with integrity. However, we spend much more to manage the problem; it just keeps going. It's destroying our downtown and killing business after business in the central core. Recently, Sears moved out of the downtown. A huge multi story building has been emptied by Sears. I don't know if anything has taken over to fill the void. The Bay is probably next, and if the Bay goes, there goes downtown Calgary.

So, what's my conclusion, and what the heck is it about that stone? Well, it goes like this, I'm concluding the reason we're in this situation, is because we have built a society where people would rather keep their jobs than do them. We have an army ofbureaucratsand accountants and no one to do the work. In Calgary, there is one psychiatrist working for Access Mental Health who is assigned to the homeless. He works a couple of days a week, a couple of hours a day. And that's for over 1,000 very sick people. He works out of an office. You need an appointment and have to go through a screening to see him. You fill out a form. You wait for a phone call and two separate phone interviews fromscreeners. If you're lucky, you can see him in a couple of months. So, if you're mentally ill, homeless, have the where with all to keep it together for a while and have a cell phone -- hey, you're in luck!

It's based on the difference between our perception of the problem and the reality of the problem. Which is why I keep harping on Truth all the time. There's a huge difference between our perception and reality. People who believe their perception happens to be reality are people who are mentally ill. Those of us who strive to come closer to reality and overcome their assumptions and perceptions, are those who are a lot closer to good mental health. In other words, to get right down to it, we have built a society which has lost it's fundamental integrity. It is inherently corrupt.

A couple of weeks ago, the federal minister of health lambasted a conference of physicians over the drug shoot-up havens provided for in Vancouver. He based his condemnation of the bevy of doctors on the simple fact that what they were doing was simply morally wrong. It was a wrong thing to do to provide access to the poison that was killingtheirpatients when they could, in fact,actuallyheal them. It's a step forward. There may be arguments against him, but his premise is sound. There has to be someone, somewhere, who is willing to take the moral high ground and damn the consequences; let's heal people, lots of people. We don't need morebureaucratsor accountants; we need people on the street getting the job done.

Further episodes of Homeless Mentally Ill

Further podcasts by Bruce Rout

Website of Bruce Rout