Talked at length with a man at the Catholic Worker Storefront, a evening drop in center for the disadvantaged in the area. He said several years ago, he was homeless in another municipality to the west of here, and was picked up by the police. He was then transferred to the Toledo Psychatric Hospital, which started a string of psychiatric hospital, and jail, visits over the next three years. While he didn’t say what his diagnosis was, as we were talking he demonstrated features of someone with bi-polar disorder in a manic phase… There seems a significant number of people who come to the “Storefront” who have mental disorders, and are either living on the streets, or living in tenuous, month-to- month situations on low rent apartments, and so on. As a mental health counselor, I worked for a time as a liaison between a drug and alcohol outpatient treatment program in Lorain, Ohio and the Cleveland Psychiatric Institute. I saw, first hand, the desperation of people living (actually often just surviving, or worse) in the hell of mental illness, sometimes coupled with addiction as well. These people need comprehensive help on all levels: quality mental health counseling and proper medication, if needed; job training and\/or education; a team of people (from a church, civic group…) to help them with such life skills as budgeting, nutrition, home ownership. Short of all this, many will be left to: “just survive.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Talked at length with a man at the Catholic Worker Storefront, a evening drop in center for the disadvantaged in the area. He said several years ago, he was homeless in another municipality to the west of here, and was …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}