Living on the Edge

Help for the mentally ill homeless is hard to find

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Part three of an occasional series about the challenges people face making ends meet in Nassau County.

It was the summer of 2012. Madeleine Petrara Perrin, an attorney from Bayville, couldn’t get over how much Joe had changed. She had last seen Joe, a Bayville native who was 56 at the time, at his apartment a year earlier when she was volunteering for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charitable group committed to ending poverty.

Joe was a shell of his former self.

Perrin, who was then 48, said she barely recognized him. He had been heavy the last time she met him. Now he was emaciated, sitting cross-legged on the curb in a Bayville supermarket parking lot, hungry and alone, smoking a cigarette. He was homeless.
“I had bought cold cuts for my children and offered to make him a sandwich in my car,” Perrin recalled. “He said no because I didn’t have mayo. At first I thought he was joking. Then I got mad, until I realized I was dealing with mental illness.”

Perrin hurried home and returned with a sandwich with mayonnaise. That single act led to a two-year struggle with government agencies and nonprofit organizations to find Joe the services he needed to treat his mental illness and get him off the street.

Mental illness and the homeless
Some 20 to 25 percent of homeless people nationwide are severely mentally ill, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Mental illness is the third-ranking cause of homelessness among single adults.

People who suffer from mental illness are more likely to become homeless than other adults because they often cannot accomplish daily life skills, form relationships, interpret guidance given by others or act rationally, the National Coalition for the Homeless states.

Joe showed up at the door of the Rev. David Czeisel, pastor of the Village Church of Bayville, on a cold morning in September 2012. He was hungry.

Like Perrin, Czeisel committed to helping Joe, and eventually the two worked together to get him the help he needed. A report from parishioners persuaded Czeisel that he had to get involved.

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