1) I think the hardest part about being homeless is that it is a reminder of my personal failures in life. Pride is my mistress and she has created a sense of self-loathing. The truth is I have many friends that I could reach out to, but pride has prevented my use of those options. It is a dichotomy that is both prideful and opposite of my predicament of being homeless.
2) In my mind the duty of any social worker is clear. Regardless of a person's status, that function is to help a person move in a direction that brings about positivity in their life. While I believe that a social worker should not enable a person to make additional bad choices in life as well as holding one accountable for failures, they should NEVER try and bring about change through the use of fear and threats. To do so is patently wrong and a failure on the part of a social worker. Change is a process and a social worker is there to help a person work through it. Not too attempt to force that change.
3) First, let me say I am thankful for the opportunity to be where I am at in the sense, I have a place to be. In terms of the question, I have come to believe that at times social workers come to make the choice to approach a decision that they know what's best for someone, instead of allowing a grown human being to come to a place that allows a person's view of their own self-worth is improved. I think at times there is a pervasive ignorance of the true background of some of the residents at the facility. It is difficult if not impossible to properly treat an individual with PTSD, or any other mental condition where they can't at least try to understand what we have seen. For instance, while they were in bed, going to college, or living at home in a cushy environment, some of us were in the desert defending the downtrodden, seeing things that would make them puke or go insane. To utilize fear and threats to control rather than treat is a failure where treatment is concerned. It is tantamount to a soldier leaving a comrade behind. Something few civilians could ever understand.
4) There are many reasons why a veteran becomes homeless. In many instances a sense of antisocial pathology becomes present in the decision process of a person whom believes that not much matters anymore. The horrors of war are indescribable and those experiences can profoundly change a person. Some turn to drugs. Some turn to crime. Some turn to other vices. The sadness in all this is that had we not seen the things we saw while serving this country we would likely be in a different place. You ask why homelessness is so prevalent. One must consider the reality homeless veterans just might still be in a place in the desert mentally. Far from humanity. They left what once was to what has become over there.
5) Being treated with respect is key to treatment for veterans. Again, the employment of fear and threats is counterproductive to healing one's mind, body, and soul. Let me add, that many times the failure to a veteran begins with the military establishment. Go to war, come home fucked up, get discharged under a mental health medical board, and drummed out. It is pathetic. The very people sworn to not leave you behind do so. In most cases it is a ROTC puke that has no understanding of true service. They are doing their residency counting the days until they can make their piles of money. It should be noted that on the flip side, many military medical professionals can no longer practice medicine in the civilian world. Either they couldn't hack it, or they messed up so badly they had no choice. Either instance is unacceptable when it comes to the treatment and care of the heroes of this country.
This is but one of many articulate and impassioned looks at how and why one becomes homeless, and then a real critique of the social services arena, where veterans are treated with large doses of disrespect and lack of understanding. The systems of traditional social work are plied to the systems of control, which unfortunately are magnified when working with veterans, and then magnified to the tenth power when the social services are distributed to warped outfits like the Starvation Army.
This Navy veteran I talk with regularly, and his sense of the world is both derived from his Navy experience and "war" tutelage, as well as his life as a successful middle class worker before a traumatic brain injury and the reverberating PTSD from his time in war theaters pulled him down into a pathway of dealing with the criminal injustice system.
In the end, we are forced to abide by the systems of oppression when our rent is due and the student loans come at us daily as robo-calls from the collectors. We are forced to eschew our own humanity and look at the bizarre machination of elites working the systems of control into every fabric of the social worker's life.
Cognitive behavioral therapy, just another newish way to control deviancy; i.e., anything that goes against the grain of this highly demarcated Consumer Society that is at the mercy of predatory capitalism and corporate thuggery at every turn, to include representative democracy - which is both contradictory and an oxymoron, but completely elegantly literal when we see who and what are the representatives' controller.
This sub-society, which marks a large swath of Americans of all color lines, the armed services is more than just a microcosm of American life. The vested interests of the War is a Racket profiteers and the inane insanity of flag waving and saber rattling by the masses make for a very colluded place of entropy of the human spirit, let alone the human project of civilization.
Controlling people is what the entire project of the military is about, and it's about making mostly young, pliable minds accept the anti-human proposition of sticking a bayonet into the neck of a woman, or spraying white phosphorus on a fleeing group of people (families), or sending hundreds of civilians to kingdom come with hellfire missiles.
Some homeless veterans are ticking time bombs, and the spoils of war are addiction, homelessness, joblessness, fear, anger, loathing, confusion, chronic illness, disease, and much-much more, including delusions and just plain deep-deep anguish and regret.
Applying the overlords' systems of control onto damaged people, and then seeking restitution for the mistakes made by these wandering veterans, and then pushing them into untenable situations where failure is guaranteed, well, the system and the cogs in the system are guaranteed a career or job for decades to come.
The solution is to give way to dreams, to allow all damaged people to repair, instead of continuing the oppression that eventually breaks the human spirit. Healing includes communal places, out of the cities, into the sun and cold of the land. Land-based places of healing, with yurts, microhomes, communal gathering places. But the society now is against such socialistic and collective action. And so the night train of terror continues in the hearts and minds of the clients, and the oppressors, big and small, are the shadows of the ghosts to come, the clanging empty things at the end of their lives, where they just might peer back and see that they were not the good people in their minds but the people who helped keep the systems of oppression going, just for the shekel, just to keep the deepest emancipation of fear at bay.
The Starvation Army breaks people who are damaged, and the very process of blaming the veteran for all the things the capitalist society has festooned them with precipitates more and more veterans to believe they have no other choice than suicide or going postal, or for some, they end up believing the fable of a giving Christianity as the monster of religion draws and quarters them into puddles of fear.
I say to my friends at the facility: Dream, man, dream, woman! It's okay to be angry, but it's better to fix that anger, and do something to thwart it for future generations.
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