This small Italian city might have an answer for L.A.'s homeless catastrophe
Kerry Morrison had seen enough. She was not a clinician or policymaker, and she didn’t know what the answers were. But she knew she was looking at failure, and she knew she could no longer ignore it.
Kerry Morrison, left, talks to Keith Weston, 52, who is homeless, at an encampment on El Centro Avenue in Hollywood. One of the first people she went to in Los Angeles was Dr. Jonathan Sherin, the new director of the L.A. County Mental Health Department. The doors of community mental health facilities are not locked in Trieste, and we were told that if patients choose to leave, staff members follow them to make sure they remain connected to help.
Care providers from around the world were in the northeastern Italian city of about 200,000, with daily presentations and panel discussions from attendees, many of whom spoke of innovative programs to help those in need. And then Morrison stepped up onstage with Anthony Ruffin, of L.A.’s mental health department, to talk about Hollywood’s sickest homeless people and the mostly failed efforts to rescue them.
In five days, I didn’t see a single homeless person in Trieste. Trieste has no drug epidemic, even as ours rages, and it’s harder to help people with both a serious mental illness and a debilitating addiction.The Hollywood pilot will serve those who are housed as well as those who are unsheltered, but there will be legions of the latter. At one point, Christina Miller asked the lead psychiatrist in Trieste — Dr.
Also, Trieste has no shortage of mental health facilities for its clients, no matter the severity of their illness. We have epic shortages of everything. We also have a disjointed, beastly bureaucracy and criminally tortuous billing systems designed to beat the breath out of hope. The Hollywood pilot has to be built to eviscerate those problems and free a well-trained army of people to serve a far larger population, and whatever clicks in Hollywood has to be rolled out to the rest of the county as quickly as possible.
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