Sleepless and Homeless in Seattle

Is homelessness a sign of mental illness?

A homeless and hungry man was choked to death in a New York Subway earlier this month.

The gentleman’s name is Jordan Neely. Having a name should put a human identifier on to a person, but we all see homeless people every day in most US cities and we don’t know their names, even if we sometimes recognize their faces.

Mental health is always brought up as something that causes people to spiral down into addiction, depression, homelessness, and incarceration.

And there is mental illness.

Our society is mentally ill.

You could even say as our home, Earth, is threatened, more and more of us feel the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual deficits of losing true security and stability.

More and more often, we see shootings, more harassment, and more frequency of abuse against the homeless. And, crime within the homeless population itself proliferates as space gets tight and tempers flare.

Living in the Anthropocene,— our age of man-made climate crisis — means that each and every breathing person is affected by pollution, extraction industries, debt/wealth inequality, and climate injustice.

At the intersection of haves and have-nots

It is no wonder that as we have more and more people either as refugees or having fallen into poverty, there are more people in need of shelter. There are many more to come if North Africa and Europe’s challenges tell us anything about the present state of our world.

We also have tensions with our policing systems, and homelessness is likened to criminal behavior, especially if one sleeps near private property.

There are very few factors that do not impact our fundamental need for shelter and community. The growing gap between the mega-wealthy and the rest of society defines who is acceptable. And, Race, gender, religion, region, veteran status, and many more intersecting aspects come into play.

Even the recent (and still ongoing) COVID pandemic comes into play in the Anthropocene.

When we lived in the Seattle area, it became too traffic tangled, loud, crowded, and polluted by noise, light, and noxious scents.

We moved a long time ago, and it is far worse now.

Sleepless in Seattle

We had to sell our home before the big price increases in housing, but we then had to purchase another one as prices soared.

For a brief time, we were “homeless” and stayed in our van. It’s better to be sleep deprived in a car than to be sleepless on soggy Seattle streets. This is a luxury most homeless people do not have. We met people who had to stay in their cars in parking lots, and many are willing to take the risk rather than have to deal with the shelter systems. Shelters do exist, but they are limited in number. They come with rigid rules and like most Americans, homeless people like their independence.

Yet, neighbors of homeless encampments feel as though it is their lives that are being challenged.

There is something very undignified and inhumane in making the victims of sleeping on the street the villains that “ruin the area.” We taxpayers, in effect, support a system that regularly moves them on without solving societal causes. This is called a “sweep”, and this raid on a local Seattle encampment displays that pretty powerful big guns and pressure can crack down on encampments.

A sweep, as the name implies, sounds like a cleaning measure, a tidying-up task that removes the “trash” and puts it somewhere else — usually temporarily. Despite this, Seattle is known as one of the more progressive and compassionate cities in their approach and transforming approach as this local program describes on NPR.

Trash and debris are part of the problem, but the people are not the trash. Those who profit from a disposable world — the Walmart size retailers, Tech giants, and Amazon Inc. monopolize our dollars. They drive real estate ownership and consumption. Yet, they are not the ones paying the externalized price.

Meanwhile, wealth and ownership disparities continue.

If people can, they are more likely to segregate from the homeless population rather than to get actively involved with housing, sharing, or helping them.

We move more and more into high-security walled-in homes, or onto streets with amply appointed security cameras and systems. The systems of Home Owners’ Associations, (HOA) proliferate, and they are very upfront about wanting to dispel impoverished people, discourage non-owners, and even set up barriers to visitors.

John Oliver recently did a show on HOA participation that is worth a look. He also has an older show on homelessness that is well worth a view.

To summarize his point, we presently focus on the comfort and well-being of the already housed, not on the plight of the struggling.

We live several miles from Seattle now, and only venture into the big cities by public transport if we can. But public transport, as the opening story about Jordan Neely tells us, has its own issues.

Public mental health demands public participation

We cannot segregate our way out of the tragic reality of ailing, cold, (or overheated) hungry, and sometimes desperate people.

If we could just buy our way into more pristine places we would need several more planet Earths than we have.

In the PNW, encampments pop up all along primary freeways and in green spaces that may or may not require tents or shanties.

It is sad to see and too easy to look away.

Finding human ways to address the ever-increasing problem of shelter as more and more people find themselves in crisis is crucial if we are to find connection enough to survive the present challenges of climate, wealth disparity, consumption and waste, over-crowding, and most of all, a lack of a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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