There are people in every homeless shelter who are severely mentally ill. Last night, a woman who talks a lot at night was in the bed that was a few feet from mine.
She talks nonstop, ranging from muttering to loud raging that can only be described as aggressive gibbering. She does a lot more of the talking to nobody at night than she does during the day, which has caused me to suggest to her a few times that she saves her talking for night time because then she has a captive audience. I think that a real mental health professional who could do real counseling and psychiatric work with her every day could help her to recover her personality and ability to interact with people, but she's not likely to get that.
Mental health care was already abandoning people like her as being hopelessly psychotic decades ago, even before the entire mental health profession was taken over by the pharmaceutical industry which tells everyone that chemical imbalances that you'll have and for which you'll have to take medication for the rest of your life are causing your illness.
There's not much reason to counsel someone every day if she has an incurable, chemical imbalance, is there? That's what the pharmaceutical industry wants the world to believe so it can sell more drugs. Unfortunately, that means that high quality counseling is much more difficult to get than it was before the pharmaceutical industry bought the world, and consequently more people are being driven mad in the old way and they don't get better.
This woman would not be out of place in any mental hospital of the past several hundred years. That's how she sounds.
Sometimes I get annoyed with her and am sarcastic. That was how I started talking to her last night; then I felt bad and was nicer while asking her to be quiet. The last of several times that I asked her to be quiet after a staff person was asking if she should send the guest to sleep in the lobby and I'd said no, the staff person walked away and the sick woman said "I'll masturbate for you."
Then she masturbated; I'm assuming that she did because she moaned a few times and then continued her muttering and louder talking nonstop for the next 4 hours. I slept through some of it, but I couldn't sleep through all of it.
At 1:00 this morning, I told her that I would ask a staffperson to send her to the lobby if she didn't stop talking. She didn't. I told her "This is the last time that I'm going to ask you before I talk to a staffperson." She said "Leave me alone" and kept talking. She also did some loud coughing; she's done that for hours before when she has a bed near me. She's not the only very mentally ill homeless person who has heard about coughing at me. How to bully is not a difficult concept to convey to a miserable human being who has no personal power and hates other people categorically, especially a nonverbal form of bullying that takes no intellectual effort and has a licentious and very offensive meaning.
When a staffperson told her that she would be sent to the lobby and/or that the police would be called if she wasn't quiet enough so that people around her could sleep, she stopped talking and went to sleep.
Despite what the conglomerate likes to say about me, it's as unpleasant for me to be around people who are masturbating as it is for anyone else. Having someone force something sexual on you, or force exposure of himself or herself to you, is degrading. It's something that has happened to other homeless people; homelessness takes almost all privacy out of quotidian life. Some homeless people like to shock other homeless people by treating them that way, although deliberate exposure of total nudity or masturbation doesn't happen that often. It has happened a few times every year that I've been homeless that the person in the other bunk of the bunk bed that I'm in masturbates; usually people try to be quiet and not have anyone know, but the bunk bed has a certain shake to it that is unmistakable and moans or gasping also tend to be signals.
Homelessness isn't as funny as most of society thinks it is.
Copyright L. Kochman, January 1, 2016 @ 9:43 a.m.