By Sterling Walters
I read Carole Orlin’s commentary (SMDP, Nov. 21, page 5), as well as Randy Walburger’s letter (SMDP, Nov. 30, page 4). Let me add a few of my own comments. There are a number of homeless people in Santa Monica — “vagrants,” if you will — who appear to me to be so markedly disabled and non-functional, and yet so disengaged from the social service delivery system, that the only way I can think of in order to get them linked up with that system is make them more rather than less comfortable with street living.
For example, there is one woman I know of who has been living on the Santa Monica streets for at least five years. Her only contact with the social service system is to pick up few sandwiches each day and a few clothing items now and then. She is dirty, disheveled and stinks of urine. She carries her possessions, which seems to consist of more urine saturated clothes, in a black plastic trash bag. She is literally frightening and bizarre to look at. She has been banned from the public library. She also has been banned from a number of the senior citizen food service programs around town.
Although I am not a psychiatrist, her thought processes and speech strike me as being as bizarre as does her physical appearance, full of references to the ubiquitous, “they,” as in, “they stole my bag last night,” and, “they’ve been watching me,” and, “they know where my sleeping spot is.” I don’t believe she knows how sick she is.
I have come to the same conclusion that American psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey has: The mental health laws need some overhaul so as to permit mental health workers to literally pick up this woman — and others equally ill — from the streets and enter her, and them, into treatment for at least a brief period under the watchful eye of an ethical and conscientious individual who would function as a conservator. Yes, I am referring to involuntary hospitalization.
This is of course extremely controversial, but I think necessary. In response to Mr. Walburger’s question about whether I might believe that the homeless are, “having a wonderful time,” on the streets, my answer is, of course, no. Many homeless people seem to be haunted by internal demons and bedeviled by voices that only they can hear. I would not want to “criminalize” them, but neither would I want to facilitate their greater comfort with “street living,” which would amount to just letting them fend for themselves, which is nothing more than a cloak for indifference.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 9, 2005. Read the original PDF.