What is your time horizon?
A person’s “time horizon” is how far into the future they think about and plan for. Quick quiz: 1.Have you already thought about what you want to do this weekend? If you have, then your time horizon is at least a week. 2. Have you already thought about where you want to take your next […]
I’m bored so I’ll drink.
I had a friend who ran a recovery home for people trying to stay sober. He told me that for his clients, boredom was the number one cause of relapse. I just read a fascinating article titled: What is the perceived relationship between boredom and substance use among persons who are unhoused? *1 The answer […]
Why saving fewer lives feels better
My wife and I stood outside Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. Kibera is one of the largest slums in the world, home to 1,000,000 people, by some estimates. This was a depth and scale of poverty unlike anything I had seen before. The average resident earns less than $2.00 per day. There are […]
When is the laundry not about the laundry?
It was nighttime in the shelter dining room. The lights were dimmed. Not much was happening. One old man with wispy hair was eating a late-night snack. An apple. And out of nowhere, Suzanne started yelling. She accused the old man of cutting in line for laundry the week before. Not five minutes before. The […]
My teacher was a pulled-pork sandwich.
I was 21-years-old and had worked at a homeless shelter for exactly one week. I had the unearned confidence of youth. It was later in the evening when I finally found time to grab a tray of food. Pulled pork sandwich, Kool-Aid and something else (green beans maybe). Honestly, I don’t remember the vegetable. I […]
My grandfather’s underwear
My grandfather’s father died when my grandfather was a young child. He was raised in desperate poverty by his mother and aunt during the great depression. My grandfather’s favorite joke (though it was true) was: “During the Great Depression, I wore hand-me-down underwear from my older siblings. I only had sisters.” From those humble beginnings, […]
Homelessness is like Cholera.
Cholera In 1854, London had a bad cholera outbreak. Doctors worked around the clock. They treated patient after patient — fever, cramps, dehydration. Some survived. Many didn’t. And every morning, there were new patients at the door. Nobody stopped to ask why. They just worked tirelessly to treat the patients. Then a doctor named John […]
I am REALLY nervous to send this email.
Let me pull off the band-aid: The reason I am sharing this with 80,000 people is that we NEED to learn how to talk about mental health. When we don’t talk about mental health: The second point was driven home in an interview I did with a New York Times bestselling author who struggles with […]
Poverty Culture vs. Middle-Class Culture
In college, I spent some time as an exchange student in Ghana (West Africa). Culturally, it was VERY different than my upbringing in suburban America: The American students approached the cultural differences in unique ways: How Humans Evolve In Cultural Understanding Dr. Milton J. Bennett developed a model of the six stages people go through […]
What is “Staff Splitting?”
Want to test your de-escalation knowledge again? Can you answer this question? In the context of mental illness, what is “Staff Splitting?” a) The practice of splitting staff into teams that are specially trained on different mental health disorders. b) A common symptom of schizophrenia, in which the individual assigns different personality traits (“splits”) to […]