On the Prejudice Faced by Homeless People

I’ve read plenty about the challenges faced by the homeless, written by those who presume to help them despite, or perhaps because of, never having experienced homelessness themselves. Listen to government officials in particular speaking of it as if they had already figured it out using spreadsheet governance. See these columns over there? Homeless is stupid simple: Home and Less. The homeless need more homes, and of course more affordable homes. Oh, they also need money because they’re shit broke, food and clothing because they can’t manage their money, counselling because they’re all idiots, life skills because they’re all feral, mental health interventions because they’re all deranged. And above all they need to be kept out of sight because they’re hurting respectable taxpayers’ sensibilities. Behold the miracles of Microsoft Excel! Now let us save you from yourselves, or we’re going to perpetually put you in jail for being uncooperative.

Allow me to retell that story from the perspective of someone who’s experiencing homelessness and is volunteering on the front lines every night: The single worst challenge the homeless face is prejudice, especially by those very people who presume to help them. My own experience in particular taught me just how toxic society’s help can be, especially that of the government. Their saviour complex reeks of condescension, if not outright predation. I would go as far as comparing their interventions to residential schools, especially considering how many homeless people die as a result of the system’s incompetence and indifference.

One problem with those reaching out to the homeless is to presume they need money first and foremost. This leads to what I call the disability plea deal. Basically, everyone involved with the system believes their core mission is to put the homeless on disability assistance, somehow, anyhow, because they need money—even fraudulently. Doctors think it’s their sacrosanct duty to diagnose the homeless with something that will get their homeless patients on disability, even if it’s a bogus psychiatric disorder no one who’s ever met the patient in question would believe. Outreach workers likewise, and may go as far as advising the homeless to either fake a psychiatric disorder or take hard drugs “just once” to produce a positive drug test and pretend to get addicted; I’ve even met some who became addicted after being rejected for disability assistance who most likely thought they could indeed take it “just once” after listening to outreach workers’ advice.

There’s no point in reporting it to the government, though, because they already know; it’s like that by design. I indeed call it the disability plea deal because the government doesn’t give a shit about addressing the homeless’ real issues, such as any invisible disability they may have. What the government wants is twofold: to save face, and to break the homeless. That’s it. Not only doesn’t that attitude solve anything, it stigmatises the ‘clients’ to the point they can never get the help they need. Who cares if they suffer as long as they can be hypermedicated into utter docility and institutionalised. There, problem solved.

I’m not making this up. I myself had tentative diagnostics of autism and social anxiety by a doctor working for a charity, who couldn’t be bothered to investigate my actual medical condition and who thought getting money from the government was a homeless person’s “human right” or something. I myself was advised by multiple outreach workers to either fake social anxiety (what’s to fake, really; it’s so damn broad any introverted people arguably meets the criteria) or test positive for some street drug. And a government worker tried to get me through that back door after learning I got rejected for disability assistance by the front door, knowing exactly what it entailed. I told them all to go fuck themselves; I don’t need their money that bad. But not everybody has my backbone, and many end up yielding instead, to their detriment.

Another huge issue is lack of pertinent clinical knowledge by outreach workers, and frankly even by doctors. I’ve hardly met any outreach worker who could tell the symptoms of someone high on meth or cannabis; they may even have been obliviously working with a colleague high on speed ever night shift until I told them it’s obvious as fuck. They know nothing of psychiatric symptoms and have no insight of what causes them—and it’s not just drugs. A significant portion of the time I spend advocating in the homeless’ defence is sharing basic clinical knowledge, about conditions as varied as sleepwalking, brain damage, side effects of common medication, and breast cancer. As for the training they get to handle people with “behavioural issues”, it’s dispensed by people who never had a job, let alone done outreach, and so naive it’s like pouring fuel on the fire; outreach then goes as far as lecturing people who are obviously experiencing psychosis, and calls the police when it fails.

Doctors? The worst part is that physicians are trained to address medical conditions by symptom, so they treat mental health symptoms with psychiatric medication, without any concern for what is actually causing them. I’ve met many homeless people who manifestly had underlying medical conditions causing their psychotic episodes, and sometimes I could even tell which with negligible research because it was so blatant. But it’s so much easier—and lucrative—to medicate them into outright zombification. I would go as far as claiming the homeless’ worst enemy is the psychiatrist. No reform is more urgent in addressing homeless patients’ problems than treating those with mental health conditions like ordinary patients, treating the condition at the source, and no expense would be more helpful than getting these patients extensive testing like whole exome sequencing without balking at the price tag.

So you too presume to help the homeless? Allow me to give you the classical advice: take two aspirins and lie down on a couch, it’ll pass. If it doesn’t, well buy a tent and a sleeping bag, and spend the next six months sleeping in a park and getting by without spending a dime, living on charity, and learning from actual experience; even better, try volunteering alongside outreach staff while you’re at it, doing some helping with your own two hands instead of throwing money at the problem. Then you’ll be cured forever of the delusion one can solve the problem by “managing” it better. Because the actual problem is prejudice first and foremost, and that’s not management, that’s just pest control.