Reintegration and Financial Support

Before 1954 almost everyone with schizophrenia was living in a hospital, a lunatic asylum. There was no treatment for schizophrenia before 1954. It wasn't really asylum in that they were treated very poorly in those hospitals and conscientious objectors serving military time during World War Two raised such a stink about how the mentally ill were treated in such asylums that the American government spent some money humanizing them. After 1954 though large numbers of people with schizophrenia were discharged with no more follow-up than a prescription for Chlorpromazine (Thorazine). In the sixties and seventies the homeless population swelled with large numbers of people too disorganized by their untreated schizophrenia to keep a roof over their head. Although there is usually more follow-up to a hospital discharge now, the number of homeless people with untreated schizophrenia is still about a third of the total, and homelessness is becoming more visible each year as the numbers increase.

To live in the community with a disability requires financial benefits, and a variety of services that extend beyond any ordinary Ministry of Health mandates. It has become increasingly expensive to live in any North American city, and quality of life can most readily be measured by disposable income. No government wants such expenses if they can dump them on somebody else. Treating and supporting people with schizophrenia has often been a question of different government levels pointing their fingers at each other. In the US many states having been closing state mental hospitals leaving federal hospitals to pick up the slack because it is unclear whose responsibility mental hospitals really are. The US states are interested in using the money currently spent on state mental hospitals for anything but schizophrenia. In Canada, you will find the Ontario provincial ODSP financial support program forcing clients to apply for federal CPP benefits because it reduces the provincial financial burden of supporting disabled people in the community.

Life on government financial benefits is Spartan to say the least. In Ontario the ODSP allows $414 for rent and hydro. Even outside major urban centers rents are about $600 for a modest one bedroom apartment. The ODSP doesn't provide much in the way of incentives for recipients to regain financial independence through reemployment either. In Ontario you can earn $160 a month before losing 75% of any money you earn. ODSP simply reduces your benefits once you start earning more than $160 a month. The incentive is to get a job that pays $40 a week in other words.

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