Inside the world's best mental-health program to keep homeless people off the street
The ground-floor apartment isn’t fancy. There’s a beige couch against a beige wall; the drawn curtains hold the shadows in. But Renee Blais chose the mismatched furniture herself and the new curtain rod was hung by a father she’d hardly seen for years. Now she has clean dishes piled by the sink, cookbooks on a table in the living room, a foot-high rubber plant growing in a clay pot. “I’m allowed to have a pet,” she says with a grin that reveals two missing teeth. “But I think I will start with a plant.”
Costs related to mental disorders are borne by all of us: individuals, families, employers and governments.
These small things matter: opening the fridge and seeing food she bought for herself. Making coffee in the morning. A front door with a lock. Before Blais, 28, moved in this winter, she was homeless, prostituting herself for drugs, her every possession stuffed in a bag. She fell asleep knowing her shoes might be stolen by morning – or worse.
“At the end, I didn’t want to live any more,” she says. On the street, “you are surrounded by people, but it’s the loneliest feeling ever.”
Now, she says brightly, “I am not using, I am not lost and all over the place. Since I moved in, only good things have been happening.”
Renee didn’t find a home; this home found her. Or more precisely, Jason Platts found her, casually showing up on the streets of the low-income Ottawa neighbourhood of Vanier, inviting her for coffee, visiting her in hospital when she was diagnosed with a bacterial infection. It’s Platts’s job, as an outreach worker for the Canadian Mental Health Association, to wait for her to say she’d had enough of life on the street, and then help her leave it – in this case, by finding an apartment in the city’s east end and giving her the support she needs to stay there.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/to-help-the-homeless-first-find-them-housing/article24646387/?click=sf_globefb
= new reply since forum marked as read
to deal with the mentally ill is to send the cops in to kill them or lock them up and allow them to wallow in their own feces. http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026740077 
