T
he scene was surreal. On a Tuesday morning in March inside the House of Charity homeless shelter, a man screamed at the top of his lungs. House of Charity staff tried in vain to calm him down. He thought he was being shot at. “You’re trying to kill me!” he hollered. An employee at House of Charity called a mental health crisis line for help. But seconds turned into minutes and tensions were rising. The place was packed. A fistfight erupted that had mild-mannered Ed McCarron, the shelter’s director, rolling on the floor to break the combatants up. “You’re going to shoot me!” So the shelter employee dialed 911. “It’s just like that here every day,” says House of Charity case manager Heather Schleigh with a shrug in her cramped office. “It’s life or death. They’re either immediately suicidal or we’re worried for somebody’s safety.” At House of Charity, mental health crises are commonplace. Nationwide, homeless individuals disproportionately experience severe and persistent mental illness — at least four times the rate of the general population, according to the National Alliance
Calling for Help How do you deliver mental health care to Spokane’s homeless? BY DEANNA PAN
Hector Ortiz, a House of Charity patron, has started to get treatment and medication through Frontier. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
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on Mental Illness. Many also suffer from a concurrent substance abuse problem like alcoholism or drug addiction. According to data collected this year from Spokane’s “One Day Count” in January, 22 percent of homeless people surveyed said they were mentally ill. Thanks to Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, homeless men and women have the opportunity to get routine and preventive mental health care. The challenge, says Barbara DiPietro, director of policy at the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, is whether or not they’ll use it: “Now we’ve opened the door to more services, how do we connect people who need those services to those treatment slots?” “Sometimes, people have associated mental health workers with the legal system. They’re afraid they’re going to get into ...continued on next page
APRIL 17, 2014 INLANDER 13