The Blind Man Society

Hello readers, my name is Joy! To quickly introduce myself I’m a current barista and mental health counseling student, cat mom of three, and bibliophile. When Jonathan asked me to write about something mental health-related for his blog, I brainstormed a list of ideas. I decided on this one today because it coincides with my other passions: social justice and activism. 

I was looking through Instagram when someone I follow shared a post from a man named Leo Gnawa. He was asking people to buy his books so that he could pay rent, adding that they would be helping him avoid facing homelessness again. He had two books published then: Homeless Lives Matter and Homeless People Are Human Beings Too. I bought Homeless Lives Matter and found it in the mail a couple of weeks later. In the second chapter, he said something that stood out to me.

“Most people assume that the homeless are crazy people. Well, I will not deny that a lot of homeless people suffer from mental illnesses. It is obvious in the abnormal and asocial behavior that many homeless exhibit on the streets. Years ago, government-run mental institutions all over the country including St. Elizabeth hospital in Washington DC, had released a large number of mentally ill individuals on the streets. This is why you see so many mentally ill homeless out there. It is also evident that harsh and degrading conditions can mentally affect anyone subjected to homelessness” (Gnawa, 2016, pg. 39). 

Suddenly I was back in San Francisco on my way to the BART listening to the nonsensical screaming of someone experiencing homelessness while a friend muttered “must be drugs” and told me to be safe. I was back in Austin walking down the drag watching a man yell at an electrical box, overhearing some students snickering about meth while they watched him. I was back at a protest listening to a woman shout about how all of us “will pay for this!” and being stopped by a man who said, “Please don’t be worried, she’s no threat. She’s schizophrenic and she thinks you’re all spying on her with your phones.” He was concerned about her. I wondered where these people would be if they had the care they needed, and how the man screaming at the electrical box was.  

While I did not find anything online to back up Gnawa’s claim regarding St Elizabeth Hospital, I did find an article titled “The Lost Patients of Washington’s Abandoned Psychiatric Hospital” by Sydney Brownstone. In this article, Brownstone talks about how a woman named Carrie Davidson is searching for evidence and information about her great-grandmother, a former patient of Northern State Hospital in Washington who disappeared, along with many others. In this article, Brownstone states that “austerity-driven political decisions pushed Northern State patients into group homes and onto the street when the hospital closed in 1973. The legacy of those policies shapes the system today, as people with serious mental illnesses ricochet among Seattle streets, jail and the few remaining state psychiatric beds in Western Washington” (2023). 

The homeless community faces many struggles, mental illness just being one. But I believe it to be an important one that I don’t see discussed that often.