Formerly-homeless man Dave Phillips making soup at The Village at Mental Health America. Photo by Danielle Carson.
In the basement of a large red building in downtown Long Beach, a woman in a dingy dress hobbles out of the single shower stall carrying several packed plastic bags, her gray curls swinging around a tanned face wrinkled with hard times. After sitting silently for a moment she leans towards a staff member explaining the never-dull day at The Village at Mental Health America.
“So, are you a client or do you work here?”
As if she had rehearsed it, MHA staffer Hillary Kyle looked at her with a curious smile and said, “You never really know, do you?”
Started in 1990, MHA Village believes that the start to recovery from homelessness is mutual trust and understanding. The doors to both entrances for the building on the corner of 5th and Elm Streets downtown are painted red to welcome anyone inside.
Several blocks deeper into North Long Beach, Chaplain Jeff Levine pats a recovering addict on the back as she prepares lunch. Long Beach Rescue Mission (LBRM) is a faith-based facility that offers multiple programs to get the homeless back on their feet.
Levine, the Resident Services Manager, said many homeless like to rely on immediate, commitment-free services like the “three hots and a cot” that LBRM offers, so that they can continue living on the streets free of responsibilities. However, these services have become a part of a growing business model that aims to dig into the root of homelessness by offering housing, medical and other vital services. For Levine, mental illness is no more than an obstacle to recovery.
“What we really want to do is prevent kinda this revolving door and create a system where we are empowering people to overcome homelessness rather than enabling them to continue to stay homeless,” Levine said.
In the upper corner of Levine’s spacious office sits a row of government-issued medical literature. He takes down an antiquated book from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, which is meant to provide all the answers for treating substance abuse in homeless persons with co-occurring disorders.
“This thing just sits up there and gathers dust,” Levine said. “I’m not going to try to be something I’m not.”
*****
Midway through a sentence Shawn Stacy Rose becomes frustrated and puts his face in his hands. The schizophrenic homeless man, a lone wolf of many words, sits in the browning grass along Ocean Boulevard. He has a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other, and all of his belongings sit close by.
“Well, it’s a split line between choice and necessity sometimes. I’m not always homeless … [I’m one of those mentally ill people that] don’t get along well with other mentally ill people,” said Rose, who despises boarded care provided by the state.
For the mentally ill in Long Beach, the resources are plenty. Rose has his own private doctor and takes medications regularly, and others use services such as those offered by The Village at Mental Health America. However, he said he prefers to stay out of boarded care provided by the state, where he’s crammed in a room with a roommate who is just as unpleasant as he realizes he himself can be.
According to a 2009 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless, around one in every four homeless people is mentally ill, while 6 percent of Americans are severely mentally ill. Fifteen percent of people seen by California’s public mental health system experienced homelessness at least once in a one-year period. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development defines a chronic homeless person as one with a disabling condition that has been continuously homeless a year or more or has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past 3 years.
“Jesus is in Long Beach,” said a mentally ill homeless woman named Monique as she sat outside of the First Congressional Church Homeless drop-in center on Sunday, waiting for the doors to open for lunchtime. She’s grateful that she no longer roams the streets of L.A., full of drug dealers and starvation.
Monique, ringing her doughy hands, her air askew, said she has the resources to get an apartment and anything she needs. But the mother of two, whose children have been taken by the state, prefers to be alone in the streets rather than the complex that a facility akin to The Village made available for her.
Monique said she was traumatized by the living conditions in the apartments. Every day, she said, her moist eyes staring fixedly at the ground, her heart broke for the families shattered by invisible fathers and drug-addicted mothers, who struggled to care for litters of children in small rooms packed like cubicles in the downtown buildings. Although she’s now a nomad without a wink of sleep, she swears she’ll never go back.
“Homelessness in itself I think is a mental health condition,” said Stephanie Love, the clinic manager at The Children’s Clinic Family Health Center in the Westside. Love frequently sees homeless clients and said that drugs and alcohol are often used to cover up they symptoms of a mental illness, but every person is different. She has seen homeless skepticism of homeless services because they fear they’ll be locked away in a mental hospital.
Due to the cyclical nature of mental disorders such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, depression or episodes of mania can play a major role in perpetuating a person’s homelessness. In such cases, a chronic mental illness can be a leading cause of chronic homelessness.
“One thing that I will say about the city of Long Beach that’s different from any other city is that city participates 100% in ending homelessness and insuring that these people receive services,” Love said.
The Village is a pilot of a growing number of facilities that are now offering integrated services beyond day-to-day necessities for the homeless. The Village currently serves over 100 people. Some stick around to use the facilities, some to find employment and others leave to a new home.
These integrated services respond appropriately to the fact that chronic homelessness often lies in a tangle of self-perpetuating factors, and the homeless have deeper-seated needs than daily meals and clothing.
For Dave Phillips, the answer was in MHA’s soup. After years of navigating the rocky road of chronic homelessness, a bite by a raccoon changed his mind about visiting the Village at Mental Health America, where he now works in the deli and makes sell-out soups five days a week.
Phillips said his stubbornness is what kept him on the streets for nearly a decade. He said would run from the police officers in the Police Department’s specially trained Quality of Life unit when they tried to move him from his home under a bridge near the Queen Mary. Eventually, a nurse practitioner by the name of Racy convinced him to visit Mental Health America, and two days later, he appeared clean-shaven.
“I’m around 54 years old. I was burnt out, tired of being on the street,” Phillips said. “I just got tired of … drinking every day… [thinking,] where am I gonna get my next meal?”
Still, the former sous chef still brags about his resourcefulness on the streets and says he misses the chattering of his raccoon friends. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Phillips swears that medication alone turned his life around, but according to the staff that worked with him, he made the decision himself.
“I don’t really know what [bipolar disorder] is. I know I’m high, and low, and high, and low… Phillips said.
Rick Bunce, a personal service coordinator that works at Safe Haven in the basement of MHA Village, said that a mental disorder can drive a person into homelessness, or vice versa—the isolation a homeless person may experience can amplify the disorder. Substance abuse comes into the mix if that person self-medicates, and physical disabilities can accumulate or worsen throughout the hard life on the streets.
“I refer to it as situational mental illness, like being on the street— especially for a long time— can cause delusional kind of thinking, like you’re alone in this reality,” Bunce said. “Once someone becomes housed and becomes involved in community activities and stuff like that, I’ve seen it where some of the mental illness seems to diminish a little bit just by being housed and being active.”
The staff at MHA Village is stacked with PhDs in social work, psychology and nursing; the clinic—that looks like less of a clinic than a community center—offers services for mental health, finances and housing, to name a few. However, what is a personal service coordinator would be a case manager elsewhere, because Mental Health America is working with people, not cases.
“While clinical services are provided, that’s not how we see somebody— coming in as a diagnosis,” Anne Sodano, Homeless Assistance Program Director at MHA Village said. “We see them as a person first always, and then we look at what’s getting in the way of them living a satisfying and successful life.”
Danielle Carson is a journalism student at CSULB who has spent the past semester conducting research on homelessness and mental health.
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