Anitra is a member of our Homeless Speakers Bureau, a group of homeless and formerly homeless people who speak in the community about their personal experiences with homelessness.
If you are expecting to hear from a typical homeless person, I’m not her.
I’m a 68-year-old White woman, college-educated and appear middle class.
It’s not easy to determine how many women are homeless. Homeless people often hide being homeless, or hide period. Homeless women hide the most. Of 6,000 people homeless in Seattle tonight, at least 2,000 are women or girls. Of 3,000 without shelter, at least 1,000 are women or girls.
An appalling number are elderly. The first time I stayed in a homeless shelter, on a thin mat on the concrete floor of a church basement, the woman beside me was 70, with arthritis. I didn’t know we let that happen.
Seattle is still mostly White, therefore the Seattle homeless community is a little more than half White. But people of color are homeless out of proportion to their percentage of the general population.
Homeless people come in the whole range of education and class background.
I am unusual because I became homeless due to mental illness.
Only about 20 percent of homeless people have a mental illness severe enough to keep them homeless. Others develop a mental illness or drug or alcohol addiction after becoming homeless, keeping them homeless. But a lot of people who have mental, emotional, drug or alcohol problems don’t become homeless.
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They have resources — savings, family or good medical coverage — to keep them housed. And a lot of people who become homeless are clean, sober and have no apparent mental illness, at least to start with. Domestic violence, medical bills, loss of a job — if you have more resources than problems, you’re housed; if you have more problems than resources, you’re homeless.
We do have a lot of untreated mental illness in the United States. My father had undiagnosed PTSD, my mother undiagnosed bipolar disorder. They self-medicated with alcohol. We moved a lot. I never saw one doctor, regularly, over any extended time.
So my own bipolar disorder went undiagnosed. I would go from high-energy, outgoing, A-student to floating around in a great gray fog, and nobody knew why, although adults suspected I did it to drive them nuts.
As an adult, I went from working a 60-hour week and completing a new computer program in four days, to disappearing for three days because I didn’t even have the energy to reach the phone.
As an adult, I went from working a 60-hour week and completing a new computer program in four days, to disappearing for three days because I didn’t even have the energy to reach the phone.
During what I now know was depression, I couch surfed. As I got older, erratic work history made it harder to get a good job again after I came out of depression. In 1995, at the end of a year-long depression, I ran out of couches.
I spent a few nights in traditional places (coffee shop, bus, airport lounge, even one night in the bushes) before I stumbled across Angeline’s, a day center for homeless women. That night one of the women walked me two blocks down to Noel House, a night shelter. A mental health outreach worker was there that night. She got me onto medication, disability checks and a list for housing.
I was lucky.
Noel House had only 40 beds, but it had relationships with churches that provided space and volunteer staff for overflow. After a meal, we got a ride to one of the overflow shelters.
After one week of medication, I couldn’t stand being looked after by kind people one more night. I found a self-managed shelter with SHARE/WHEEL, homeless and formerly homeless people who had organized together for survival resources, political action and community. We let ourselves in at night, set up and governed ourselves, cleaned up in the morning and let ourselves out.
I also got involved with Real Change. By the time I got into housing, February 1996, I had the biggest social network in my life.
That community kept me alive. Having that community also kept me stable in housing. A lot of people — women especially — go from being surrounded by people in shelter to being alone in their own room. For the first week, it’s wonderful. Then they become isolated, depressed and homeless again.
Without shelter, people die. Without community, people die. If we had a real community we would have housing and shelter for everyone.
If that had happened to me, I’d be dead by now. Without shelter, people die. Without community, people die. If we had a real community we would have housing and shelter for everyone. We wouldn’t have 88 homeless people die outside or by violence in the first 11 months of this year.
The same forces that leave some people sleeping under the freeway keep most other people awake at night trying to figure out how to pay all the bills and not end up under the freeway. The system hurts all of us. We have to change things, not just to save homeless people, to save us all.
And we can change it. By recognizing that we are all in this together, and acting like a community.