Statistics show that in the United States nearly 5% of us have been diagnosed with some type of mental illness. Stats also show that in the US on one night there can be as many as a half million homeless people and nearly 45% of them have some form of mental illness. That’s almost half! An amazing statistic when you see it. Affective disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders and substance abuse disorders are among the most common types of mental illness in the homeless population. Being homeless and living with a mental disorder is a […]
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The Art of Seeing
A while back, I was walking in downtown Chicago with a friend. It was December, the stores were lit up for Christmas enticing shoppers to come and spend money on shimmering gifts and goodies of all kinds. It was also very, very cold. As we passed what was then Marshall Field’s, I was approached by an elderly woman, somewhere in her 80’s, asking me for some spare change. She crept out of an indent in the building where I could see she had set up a section of cardboard and pile of dirty blankets to lie upon. She was about […]
The Hardest to Love, The Hardest to Serve
In our line of work, we sometimes reach a point where we must remind ourselves to “work smarter, not harder.” This point generally comes when we’ve been working with someone who’s exhausted all the usual routes to treatment, refused our best social work advice, and argues their way out of every healing situation we offered, denied our offers of “a better way of life” even though WE know they would be better off if they would JUST LISTEN TO US!! Working with individuals who stubbornly hold on to their last vestiges of control can be maddening for a well-meaning worker. […]
The Power of Great Leadership
There is a photo going around on the internet that shows a pack of wolves trekking through the wilderness. The view is taken from an airplane, so you can see the entire pack as it makes its way through the frozen, wintry forest path. In the lead are three elderly wolves walking together. Next come a larger group of strong hunters. They are there to protect the elderly and watch that they aren’t attacked from the sides. In the middle are weaker hunters, those that aren’t old but they’re not as limber as the others. They are followed by another […]
You are the main ingredient
There’s a show on the Food Network called “Chopped” where four chefs compete head to head to create a three-course meal using the ingredients they find in their surprise boxes. They all get the same ingredients and the rules state they must use all the ingredients in whatever they create. Each of them can use a variety of things, herbs and spices, from the pantry to create their ultimate final dishes. Of course, with all this variety, not all of the dishes are successful. This is actually a great analogy for how services are provided system wide here at KHDS. […]