A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
by Jack Bragen
Living with a mental illness can sometimes be a no-win scenario.
If you fail to take your medication or if you fail to follow other rules, you are subject to being thrown out on the street from your housing because you are considered a troublemaker.
If, on the other hand, you’re taking your medication and you’re doing all of the things you are expected to do,
by Jack Bragen
The treatment system has always been a “frenemy” to me as a mental health treatment recipient. I need these services, partly because of how the socioeconomic part of our infrastructure functions. I could not live without having money from Social Security, and having my medical care and psychiatric treatment paid for. In a “utopian” society, this might not be the case, but unfortunately we don’t live in Utopia.
by Jack Bragen
Editor’s note: This op-ed includes a time-sensitive call to action. If you or someone you know needs this service, the toll-free number is included in this column.
As I listened to the news on my transistor radio the other day, I discovered with alarm that the state might cut funding to the California Warm Line as of July 1, 2025.
by Cathleen Williams, Homeward Street Journal
In May 2024, the police got a call reporting that a man was lying outside an EV charging station with his head on the curb. When the police officers pulled up and got out of their car, they tried to get the man to move. He whispered, “Help me, help me…ambulance.” The man’s voice was so weak it is barely audible on the officer’s body-cam footage,
by Jack Bragen
My first psychotic episode was a risk to life and limb, my biggest test up to that point, my family’s big test and a precursor to what was to come in the succeeding 43 years and running.
In some respects, a second or third psychotic break isn’t as hard as the first. When I had my first extreme psychotic episode, I had no notion of what was happening to me.
by Jack Bragen
The messages are hammered in when you’re incarcerated, and you’re expected to believe them. You are told you’re no good. You’re bad news. You don’t deserve anything. Not love, not comfort, not money, nothing. You are undeserving. You are a bad person, and you should be punished.
Other people believe this of you under these circumstances. Try as you might, you can’t control someone else’s beliefs.
by Jack Bragen
Years ago, while I sat in a waiting room at a mental health clinic, I observed an old man who might have had dementia being brought in to get his shot of medication. He was grumpy and complaining at first, but said he felt better after the shot. It is plausible that the person administering it was to the man’s liking. It seems more doubtful to me that the medication,
by Jack Bragen
Most psychiatrists might agree that if you have a “psychiatric impairment” you could be locked out of the use of your own perceptual and mental faculties. Some would argue that those faculties are absent, while others could say we have potential of mind that is blocked by an impairment.
Psychiatrists tend to medicate; they believe that’s what works. I can’t argue with that. When I was started on medication,
by Jack Bragen
As a disclaimer, I’d like to emphasize that this piece does not offer proven facts, but merely opinions based on my own experience. And in that respect, it’s not unlike most of my other work.
I collect my information and draw conclusions through seeing the details in Contra Costa County, where I live. It seems that social service systems, administered by counties, are not designed to make poor people into highly successful people.
by Cathleen Williams, Homeward Street Journal
Maggie, an activist and advocate for the unhoused community, is a single mom who grew up in Venice, California. (Maggie is a pseudonym, to protect her privacy.) Today, few can afford to actually rent in Venice—Maggie lives in an oversized van: “Barely legal,” she says.
When her daughter became delusional, hallucinating, paranoid, reaching a crisis point in her struggle with mental health disability,
