Housing Like Yours and Mine - Katharine Dobbins

This article, written by Wellspring Executive Director Katharine Dobbins, was published in the December 2011 / January 2012 edition of FORsooth, a monthly publication distributed by the Louisville Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Everyone needs a home. Having a place to stow our stuff and call our own is fundamental and something most of us take for granted.  Unfortunately, that is not always the case for many among us who live with mental illness. For three quarters of a century Central State Hospital served as the largest housing provider for persons with mental illness in our region of Kentucky. In 1873, what was then called the Central Kentucky Lunatic Asylum began admitting persons with mental illness. Originally built to house 1600 patients, by 1940, it housed nearly 2500 people. This began to change in the 1950s when medications were found to be effective in treating mental illness and was spurred along by Congress’s passage of the Community Mental Health Act of 1963 which led to the creation of publicly funded mental health centers.

It has been nearly fifty years since the passage of that historic act and much has changed in our country but we have been slow to understand mental illness or address the inequities that result for those who are diagnosed with these brain disorders. Today people with mental illness rarely live in hospitals and there is increasing recognition that recovery is possible even though we have yet to find a cure. Stigma continues to be a barrier to full community inclusion and mental illness continues to be widely misunderstood despite the fact that it is far more common than many realize. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that one in four American adults will experience a mental health disorder over the course of a year and the National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that about 6% of the population (1 in 17) has a severe mental illness. It is this 6% who face the biggest challenges in cobbling together lives that include all the basics that we take for granted: work, school, friends, and home.

We know that most people with severe mental illness can (and do) live successfully in our community but affordable housing is limited as are accompanying supportive services. It is difficult to afford rent for those living on  SSI (Supplemental Security Income) due to disability because the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Louisville eats up nearly 90% of their income. Too many people live in substandard housing as a result of being disabled, and when living on such a tight margin, the threat of homelessness is always present. The Louisville Coalition for the Homeless identified just over 400 adults with severe mental illness in their street count last January. This was about 1/3 of the total count but the actual number of homeless mentally ill adults is likely significantly higher as mental illness is underreported for a variety of reasons.

Being diagnosed with a serious health condition should not result in homelessness or a lack of choice in where one gets to live. Studies show that the net public cost of providing permanent supportive housing for homeless adults with mental illness is about the same or less than the cost of allowing them to remain homeless due, in large part, to the associated costs for physical and mental health care (often emergent). Waiting lists for subsidized housing are daunting and are often years long. Of those fortunate enough not to be homeless, some (too many) with mental illness are “placed” in personal care homes which often are merely mini-institutions that segregate their residents from the kinds of lives that the rest of us want: a place to call our own, where we can invite our friends and families to visit, and membership in the communities of our choice.

Why should having a biologically based disorder like mental illness prevent many hundreds of people in our city and thousands of people in our state from having a “real” home? Like yours or mine? Where is the justice in that?

Katharine Dobbins
Executive Director
Wellspring