Psuedo-Science

PSUEDO-SCIENCE

Although the statistics recently collected by the government suggest that only 20% of “chronically homeless” people, which make up only 10% of the homeless population, have “serious mental illnesses,” Sandi Paris, former Executive Director of the Arcata Endeavor, asserts in her letter to the Homeless Task Farce that as much as 50% of Arcata’s “homeless” population are “struggling with mental illness.”

Why would she MISREPRESENT Arcata’s unhoused population as “mentally ill?” Well, it could mean big bucks for those who receive grant money based on how many “chronically homeless” and “mentally ill” people they report having in their community.

But how could someone pull off this grand illusion and fool the good people of Arcata into allowing their houseless neighbors to be labeled “mentally ill,” and possibly even forcibly detained and drugged by the “authorities?”
Well, all you have to do is get Arcata’s “friendly” institution of “higher learning,” meaning Humboldt State University, to conduct a “study” which finds out whatever you want it to! And thus HSU’s Homeless Service Plan is born...


Ending Chronic Homelessness Strategies for Action
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Report from the Secretary’s Work Group on Ending Chronic Homelessness
March 2003
This report is available on the Internet at:http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/homelessness/strategies03/
“Longitudinal analyses of the service users confirmed important distinctions among homeless persons that had first been noted by the Institute of Medicine in 1988. Specifically, the group is not homogeneous and three important subgroups regularly appear:

temporarily homeless — persons who experience only one spell of homelessness, usually short, and who are not seen again by the homeless assistance system;

episodically homeless — those who use the system with intermittent frequency, but usually for short periods; and
chronically homeless — those with a protracted homeless experience, often a year or longer, or whose spells in the homeless assistance system are both frequent and long.

These subgroups emerge from actual utilization patterns in numerous cities and show relatively similar distributions: Approximately 80 percent of users are temporarily homeless, 10 percent are episodic, and 10 percent are chronic.”

Chapter 2, page 9.
http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/homelessness/strategies03/ch.htm#ch2


National Mental Health Information CenterArticle location: http://www.mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/publications/allpubs/SMA04-3870/default.asp
“The estimated 200,000 people who experience chronic homelessness tend to have disabling health and behavioral health problems. Recent estimates suggest that at least 40 percent have substance use disorders, 25 percent have some form of physical disability or disabling health condition, and 20 percent have serious mental illnesses (Culhane, 2001).”