Mental Health Awareness: Lack of housing is a huge issue

Up until the 1970s and 80s, people with severe mental illness were housed in institutions by the hundreds of thousands. Replacing long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services became the norm, and it created a whole new set of issues.

"What we have now is trans-institutionalization," says Andrew Sperling, legislative director for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. People with mental illness leave acute or chronic care facilities without adequate provisions for their housing or support, and end up sliding into homeless shelters or the criminal justice system, Sperling says.

South Lake Tahoe is not alone.

There needs more short-term and long-term housing for those living with disabilities such as severe mental illness in cities across America. There is an unusually high number of transients and homeless population living in South Lake Tahoe. Couch surfing seems to be a common thing for nearly 300 of the 3800 students in the Lake Tahoe Unified School District. While those sleeping on couches aren't mentally ill, they share many of the same problems.

The City Council is working on changing the fact that some of the local motels that are used as single occupancy dwellings are very run down and not meeting the code requirements of long term housing.

A student in a recent National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Family-to-Family class owns a rental home in South Lake Tahoe. She desperately wanted to turn her well-kept rental home into one that the county could rent for housing those with mental illness. She contacted multiple insurance company's and could not find insurance. After two months of searching and insurance providers telling her she would need to hire a lawyer to overcome some of the hurdles required, she finally just rented to a non-disabled individual.

"It is sad because this individual really wanted to help the cause." said Jeanne Nelson of NAMI's local office. "It would be fantastic if the county or a developer or existing owner of some of the older motel units would make it a goal to overhaul these into decent homes for those with mental illness."

In a recent article on npr.org, Reed Karaim wrote: "The numbers are stark. The numbers of in-patient beds in state and county institutions for the mentally ill declined from 413,000 in 1970 to 119,000 in 1986. By the 1990s, the number fell well below 100,000.

But in 1998, 283,800 people with mental illnesses were incarcerated in American jails or prisons - four times the number in state mental hospitals, according to the Department of Justice. "These days, the largest single provider of housing for people with severe mental illness is the criminal justice system," says Sperling.

Those incarcerations are generally short-term and involve crimes like disturbing the peace or vagrancy. But no one argues that jailing the mentally ill is a solution to their housing needs. The situation persists, say some advocates, because of the stigma still attached to diseases of the mind.

"Mental illness is an equal opportunity illness -- it strikes across all barriers of race and class. Yet the public perception is still the disheveled person on the street," says Michael Allen, senior staff attorney at the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C. "