Core Dysfunctions

So you’ve just become homeless. You’re traumatized, confused, scared, ashamed, and paralyzed by the wave of emotions that come crashing around you. The despair has just begun to sink in but has not leveled you yet. You’ve been sent to a shelter and have just recovered from the shock of the dismal conditions that will be your living situation. Your first thought is: Is there any way out of this? Where can I turn to get help? Certainly there must be some program that will help me get back on my feet.
Welcome to the real world. In this world, nobody cares about homeless people. There is no program, no plan, to rehabilitate the homeless, despite all the claims to the contrary. A person arriving at a shelter in a semi-shell-shocked state goes through an intake process, gets a bed with linens and some basic toilet articles – and care stops there. If that person is fortunate, the person doing the intake has at least made it known that new intakes should register for Section 8 housing, and the client is even luckier to receive the address for applying. (Never mind that people have waited for years for Section 8 housing without positive results.) Beyond that, newly homeless people can only rely on themselves out of the situation that made them homeless. The more fortunate people manage to hook up with a core service agency (certified by the D.C. Department of Mental Health and offering, or helping clients obtain, services such as psychiatric treatment, counseling and case management, and employment and housing-related services). Unfortunately, information about these agencies is not easy to acquire, and people in need of these services may wander for a considerable time before making the needed contact with an agency. Making contact with an agency, however, doesn’t guarantee a plan for recovery. The usual procedure is to assign newly homeless people to a case manager, who allegedly coordinates the services for them. The problem is that the case manager may do precious little or nothing for them.
Also, core service agencies will almost always put the newly homeless in touch with a psychiatrist, who will then prescribe psychotropic medications, with the philosophy that medicating homeless people will make them less of a problem. People who have lost everything they had in life are now expected to seek refuge by swallowing huge quantities of medications to counteract depression, anxiety, insomnia, and a host of other conditions, all without addressing the root of the problem: the fear that all hope is lost.
To be fair, some case managers in the core service agencies are very dedicated to their work and take the cases in their charge seriously; some go above and beyond the call of duty to help their core services consumers. However, one attorney who works with homeless people confirmed that more than  once, case managers have left applications for housing vouchers on their desks, ignoring the fact that their lack of action will deny housing to people in need. It is also not uncommon for a case manager to ignore, or to refuse to acknowledge, the situations that put their consumers on the street, as well as any disabilities that they may have. Those case managers who are conscientious are often overlooked, because of the large number of case managers who seem to regard their consumers as nuisances that make their job too stressful.
Homeless consumers should not be left to flounder. It would make far more sense if case managers, after intake, would construct plans with the declared goal of getting homeless consumers back on their feet, instead of keeping them heavily medicated for indefinite periods of time. Devising a plan of action is standard operating procedure for most practitioners working in the caring professions. And homeless consumers most definitely have goals that they want to achieve, the first of which is finding suitable housing.
All too often people become homeless because of legal problems, with divorce and domestic abuse being among the leading causes. And difficulties in receiving needed benefits and services can also contribute to homelessness. On these topics, the core service agencies can be notoriously caustic. While it is not their job to offer legal assistance, if someone is homeless because of a legal problem, it makes sense for the case manager at least to help the homeless consumer obtain legal counsel to resolve the problem. However, the overwhelming majority of case managers will simply answer, “We don’t provide legal services,” and leave the consumer helpless and hopeless. Ignoring legal problems that cause homelessness is like ignoring malignant cells that cause cancer; ultimately, they will eat the sufferer alive.
Too many core service agencies don’t offer the counseling or therapy consumers need. For the homeless consumer, such as therapy could assist in development problem solving skills that could not only solve the problem of homelessness, but also prevent homelessness from recurring i the future. Happy pills are not the answer; knowing how to cope is. Giving medications without accompanying therapy is like giving a person medications for the symptoms of a disease without attacking the cause. Even if the problem goes away, the chances that it will return are all too likely.