This is an article critical of placing the seriously mentally ill in senior housing. We have to think outside the box on behalf of the mentally ill and seniors.

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She was a sweet woman. A few years older than me at time, she still made me think of someone who could play a convincing grandmother, at least ten years older than her age. Nonetheless, she retired from her job a few weeks before she asked me if I needed any boxes since I was moving. She noticed, she told me. I lived across the hall from her in this building for seniors, but she never spoke before. I rarely saw her anyway.

A few days later, I saw her again getting out of her car, and again, she asked if I needed boxes. She had plenty to spare. She added that she didn't really retire as much as she was dismissed by her boss because of the way she kept her desk. I couldn't understand what she meant, but the way she conveyed this information made me almost tear up. I looked at her, and almost teared up. If I could speak with her boss I would have asked, was that necessary?

We walked together to the elevator. She was a larger woman, so I compensated for her slower walking pace by walking just slightly behind her. We stopped at her apartment. She opened the door, and first noted that it was dark. Darker than it should be in the middle of the day. Then I saw it and couldn't follow her, as she made her way on the various scraps of paper and lint, to the kitchen, where I could no longer see her for all the boxes. Piles and piles of boxes inches from me all the way to the living room window. In the bedroom, boxes. In the kitchen. Boxes. Piled high to the ceiling. Everywhere. Nothing, I surmised had ever been thrown out. No garbage. No boxes.

And the gnats. The gnats greeted me, and as I raised my hands to wave them off, as I heard her ask, what size do you want? I really really wanted to cry. Where is her family, where is an agency, anyone who could care?

I continued to call occasionally to check on her, even though I moved from Madison to Kenosha. Then I no longer heard from her. Or maybe because I'm always trying to live one step ahead, at least, of white supremacy, I forgot to check on her.

It wasn't what I would call "quality of life." I could understand someone like this woman wanting to remain as independent as possible. In the long run, the gnats would continue to multiply. But I would think she might have been experiencing the onset of Alzheimer. A problem, some seniors, if we live long enough, will experience in our lives. She might have received the help she needed then, these seven years later. But for others who might not be so "independent"? I'm actually thinking of a worse case scenario"

The sweetness barometer dropped considerably in 2016. That year, I was diagnosed with cancer. I noticed the atmosphere becoming more caustic, all civility gradually being eaten away. There was an assumption that I was a "good" Black person in which to have a discussion about "crime" and Black people. Others assumed I wanted to hear about "immigrants" and people speaking that "Mexican" language. In my mind, I saw the video of Trump coming down the escalator, and an increasing number of white men in pick ups, openly flying the Confederate flags, and young white women at stores or even working as nurses dismissed me as if turning away from a quarreling peer"

Last year, a "paranoid schizophrenic," by his own admission, roamed the halls at night in the senior building where I lived. He didn't communicate with his fellow neighbor. Verbally, that is. But we understood and became concerned for our safety. The year before, it was a forty-something woman, who seemed to spend her time developing conflicts with senior residents. She took an older woman to court because the woman's dog barked. On day, she wanted to know why I talked about Black people so much? Was I a racist? Meaning, did I hate white people?

A few months ago, someone let me know that she had recently spent time in the jail for hitting her month.

Currently, I live in a 62-and older building but next door to a forty-something, military vet. "Patriotic." No doubt. A Black man used to live in my apartment. I was told the vet hit the man. That was a few months ago. Now I see what might have happened. I see this now deceased man rising from his armchair or bed and knocking at this young vet's door. The man having had enough, wants the harassment to cease. He would have been within his rights. But the "disabled" vet, a big guy, would have reached out and struck the man.

When vet isn't conversing with himself, he is vocal about his views on Black Americans with tenants forced to listen to his rants" The building manager, who doesn't have to live on the senior complex where she works, mentioned that the young man sees something when he takes it upon himself to "pick up" litter. He has seen something in crosses he snatches off the necks of tenants. What will he see if he encounters me, the "anti-American"! That I have become at least one character in someone's sexual fantasy, is troubling. I'm old enough to be his mother! But what does that matter? There's an illness here.

I think of those victims of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Or those victims at Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York. Or Uvalde, Texas, and Those school children, begging for help in Uvalde, Texas. And that's recent American history! You don't have to be mentally challenged to believe in the Great Replacement Theory. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explains, "claims that white people are being systematically replaced across the Western world by 'multiculturalists" and Jews." The theory is "now cited as a reality by some elected officials and cable news pundits." Just plain ignorance of American history and a refusal to come to grips with American violence and white privilege is enough to be alarmed about the placement of the mentally ill in senior housing.

Why are the mentally ill placed in senior housing?

All mentally challenged aren't a danger to others and themselves. But some are. If nothing else, seniors rent apartments in senior housing in order to avoid the blaring stereo from downstairs or across the living room wall. Seniors come to believe they will live out their remain years in relative peace, without having to contend with a resident who bullies others if they complain. No one is advocating that the number of homeless on the streets in the US be increased by turning out the mentally ill, subjecting some to potential incarceration.

But I think the issue of the mentally ill who could be a danger to themselves and others is a topic that needs to be addressed in this country.

When I did an internet search on this subject, starting with the state of Wisconsin, I found articles and images related to the closure of asylums and mental health facilities. There are tours of the "most haunted Insane Asylum in America," for example. One of them is located in Wisconsin, the "Sheboygan County Hospital," closed since 1940, is referred to as haunted"

In the margins of a city. "in a stretch of wasteland," was leprosarium. "From the High Middle Ages to the end of the Crusades," writes Michel Foucault, "leprosariums had multiplied their cities of the damned over the entire face of Europe." Leprosy disappeared but leprosariums remained. Along with the leprosariums, the "formulas of exclusion" remained. Society gathered "the poor vagabonds, criminals, and 'deranged minds'" to "take the part played by the leper."

The Ship of Fools appears and then it's replaced by hospitals for the mad, Foucault writes. In turn, "the Madhouse" becomes a fixed location to house, treat, and study those deemed mentally ill. No longer excluded from society, these individuals were to be confined now to a fixed place. All in all, the Great Confinement, that is, of the mentally ill, didn't take into consideration "quality of life" for the individuals "warehoused" in these institutions. On the contrary, these were hospitals organized into a complex unity, to solved problems of poverty, unemployment, and idleness, writes Foucault. In other words, the necessity for labor, cheap labor, made confinement "imperative." But for whom? The soon-to-be residents or society as a whole?

Critics couldn't claim that the unemployed, Foucault explains, were being excluded by confinement. The dream of unity was to join "moral obligations" with "civil laws, within the authoritarian forms of constraint." But, as with most "dreams," like that of the "American Dream," democracy isn't a consideration.

Society benefited from what must have been an experience of horror for a good many residing in these institutions. For no resident could call these sites "home." Of course, today, we see these sites still benefiting the surrounding communities in that they present themselves as haunted places, fixed sites of abandoned asylums and hospitals.

In the US, three to four percent of its citizens"more than 8 million people"suffer from serious psychological problems, according to a report in Psychiatric Services. In another report, cited in the New York Times , some hundreds of thousands of Americans with mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are "consigned to lives of profound instability." Therapists and doctors needed "to oversee their medication regimens," aren't available, resulting in individuals in need of help, cycling "through homeless shelters and jails and prisons that have become the nation's largest mental health providers."

And we know how well this option doesn't quite work for those in need of mental health. Maybe not quite the horror show of another era, but why should we make comparisons? This is a scenario that shouldn't exist in a democratic society. In a society where we aiming to evolve as human beings. The facilities aren't there particularly for the seriously mentally ill, given that we live in a society that sill is "indifferent" to the plight of 8 million citizens. "Society's neglect of the most severely mentally ill stands out."

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) another issue along with depression has increased from 14% to 15%--in general. But when it comes to the troops who served in Operation Enduring Freedom, OEF, (2001-2014) and Operation Iraqi Freedom, OIF, (2002-2011), both "operations" only entangled many in an endless struggle with terror. In the end, neither the people of Iraq nor the people of Afghanistan were freed from the tyranny of terrorism. According to David Goldstein, writing at Truthout , "nearly 20 percent of the more than 2 million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from mental health conditions." T he VA hospitals serve some 1.7 million vets and still not enough beds or medical personnel are available to accommodate vets in need.

For many vets of the OEF and OIF wars, according to a New York Times Oct 22, 2021 report, there is the "invisible" war at home, the combat and the fatigue, resulting from "feelings of displacement and alienation," which only intensified when the US "completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan" on May 1, 2021. I called the Veterans Crisis Line only to be asked if I were thinking about suicide. Was I in need of help since I sounded like someone frustrated? Really? And I'm not a vet, and the vet in need of help hasn't left his apartment for days!

It's a sad situation. Seniors with diabetes, heart conditions, cancers, arthritis, and Alzheimer, for example, struggle in their own "battles," as they come to terms with feelings of "displacement" and "alienation" too. Many seniors, too, are without the adequate health care. But most seniors and elderly, I know, desire a quieter lifestyle. Even if many continue working outside their homes or within. Most seniors and elders have had enough of "drama." Most are not able, health wise, to cope with a younger neighbor haunted by the memory of war"

And then there's the Great Replacement Theory! Because someone is mentally ill doesn't preclude freedom from racism. This is America! Corporate operators of independent senior housing complexes concerned with the Great Replacement Theory are in the business of making a profit too. Someone pointing to the injustice of anti-democratic conditions is, no doubt, anti-American. Someone who wants to replace white Americans is an enemy to battle.

For whatever "good" intentions, the placement of the seriously mentally ill in independent senior housing is of no benefit to either populations.

Authors Bio:

Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.