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# Mental illness is the tragedy within
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/mental-illness-is-the-tragedy-within/
- Published: 2006-11-27T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T23:10:33.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Downtown, #archive-import, Homeless

*Controlling the homeless crisis*

*By COMMON SCENTS BY CAROLE ORLIN*

Every time I travel, I come back home with some degree of additional insight. A few weeks ago, I spent some time in two downtown areas of large, urban areas in northern California — San Francisco and Sacramento. Given their size (approximately 739,000 and 456,000, respectively), I expected to see at least as many street people there as we have in Santa Monica (total population of approximately 87,000).

I was surprised, if not shocked. I have become accustomed to seeing people sleeping in the streets, going through the trash, panhandling, yelling on street corners and pushing stolen supermarket carts through the streets of Santa Monica. The feeling that I received as a tourist in those two larger urban cities was a sense of a relatively small amount of street people. I am sure that San Francisco and Sacramento have their share; I did not go all over the entire downtown areas. However, given the political leanings of our City Council and our welcoming reputation in the transient community, I guess I should not be surprised. It has resulted in once again thinking about the root cause of much of the problem, at least as far as the most vulnerable of the homeless people — the mentally ill — are concerned, not the sociopaths, criminals, or untreated addicts, but the chronically mentally ill.

The tragedy within the chaos is that the mentally ill, who occupy a large portion of the street population, are the victims of a policy that was enacted long before many of them were even born. I am talking about deinstitutionalization, which started back in 1955\. Deinstitutionalization is the policy of moving people who are chronically mentally ill out of institutions —which were criticized for warehousing patients, doing no more than providing “three hots and a cot”— and back into the community. With the advent of antipsychotic medications in the 1950s,and the expansion of the welfare programs in the 1960s, the push was on to move these patients out of the hospital, whether the patient or community was prepared or not. Unfortunately, the lack of planning, funding, structured housing, adequate follow up programs and case management resulted in many of the chronically mentally ill being lost to the streets. The failure of deinstitutionalization is undoubtedly the major contributing factor to our chronic homeless crisis even more than the also important economic factors.The criminal justice system, which has tried mightily but is not designed for the mentally ill, is heavily impacted as well. They are too often forced to serve as substitutes for hospitals. Recent literature highlights the fact that at any given time, there are more individuals with schizophrenia, who are homeless and living on the streets or in jails and prisons, than are in hospitals.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 27, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/112706.pdf?ref=smdp.com)