Home Sweet Home

Everybody needs a home. The concept of "home" permeates our society and is the single greatest expense in our lifetime. People with schizophrenia generally don't have much of a home because they can't afford one. There is wide range of "homes" for people with schizophrenia. Some live with their parents in middle class bungalows. Some live in government funded group homes. Some live in privately run boarding houses paying for their room and board with their disability checks. A few live in market priced one bedroom apartments, but many more live in rooming houses where the individual has one room and shares a kitchen and bathroom with the other tenants.

I myself live in probably the best housing available, a subsidized one bedroom apartment. It's a modest one bedroom that is affordable with the disability check I receive because it is subsidized by another government agency. Instead of paying $720 a month, I only pay $289. In Ontario an individual on the Disability program would have up to $414 a month allowed for rent and utilities. You can see that if a modest one bedroom in a smaller urban center is $720 that a lot of people with schizophrenia who depend on disability support will be living in substandard and precarious housing. A significant number of people with schizophrenia have no home per se. Most researchers agree that one third of the homeless have schizophrenia. They are usually not being treated for their schizophrenia and often have no awareness that they are ill.

In Canada homelessness has been receiving a lot of public attention and governments at the provincial, and federal level have recently announced millions of dollars to help the homeless. The Federal government alone has dedicated $700 million dollars to help the homeless. The provincial government of Ontario which represents one third of the population of Canada, announced $100 million of their own for the homeless. The city of Toronto conducted a thorough study of homelessness in Toronto at their own expense and the resulting study, "the Golden Report" is being used by many other municipal governments across Canada.

Part of the problem with helping the homeless, besides the fact that nobody knows very much about them, is jurisdictional. The federal government receives the bulk of the tax money, but the provinces are mandated to provide the bulk of services to citizens. In Canada you have the bizarre situation where the federal government wastes millions of dollars instead of handing the money over to cash strapped provincial governments trying to provide social services. Meanwhile homelessness is primarily a municipal responsibility. Social services like Welfare, and homeless shelters, are initiated and paid for by municipal governments with municipal tax dollars. They get some financial help from the provincial government who get some financial help from the federal government but the municipality is the leading partner. The soup kitchens and some of the emergency housing are provided by charities, religious charities usually who receive no government funds. To date there has never been very much money to help the homeless by any government. The state of the rather squalid emergency shelters, which are grossly underfunded, has never been looked at, only the number of beds they have.

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