Where do these people go?

While driving home today I caught the tail end of a great story from NPR. Recently while working on a group project and paper about schizophrenia, my mind started to focus on what happens to the people with chronic and persistent mental illness much like schizophrenia when they have no where to go. I was so surprised to find out how many people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses are homeless, although the more I thought about this, the more logical it became. Many people with schizophrenia or other debilitating mental illnesses can not maintain a job or career and eventually have no source of income. This can quickly lead to the streets where more and more people find themselves. Once on the streets with no housing, the cycle is hard to break. The disease takes over and these people become a statistic. This semester I have not heard about many positive programs helping this population. It seems like everywhere you turn, more and more cut backs, leads to less and less funding, especially in the mental health field. This news article from NPR shed a little bit of light and hope on the situation for me.

Basically "common ground" converted a run down one bedroom hotel building into housing for the homeless around Time Square in NYC. The model is set similarly to how we run groups as OTA's. Common ground starts with an assessment of the homeless population. They ask people what their medical and mental conditions are, if they want housing, and how long they have been on the streets. They provide housing for the most severe cases which happens to include folks with mental illness like Ravi who has schizophrenia and alcohol abuse problems. Once Ravi has been placed in a room he will receive medical and job training. I would like to think even some OT treatments could be offered. Just think about the difference we could make in a situation like this. The model is working and many other cities are on board to try the model in their city. Isn't this the way we as OTs sometimes base our treatment and groups. We model are services after a model that has been proven to work for a certain population, for example MOHO. Please be sure to read this article. It gave me a little hope to answer the questions of where will these people go?