"It will only increase"

On homelessness, mental illness, and the collapse of capitalist society

My back up against a bank of mailboxes in the main lobby of the shelter, I stared at the man’s knife, waiting for my coworkers to come help me.

I shouted again. And again, all the while trying to wrest the drunk man’s body away from me. He’d had me pinned against the wall for several minutes now, and my coworkers still hadn’t come. I shouted again, and again, and then I finally pushed the man with all my weight backwards. He fell, dropping the knife, and I ran into the office for safety.

“Where the fuck were you guys?” I raged, seeing both of my coworkers sitting at the main lobby desk.

They both looked up, shrugging. “The police are coming. They told us to stay in the office since he had a knife.”

My relief at escaping gave way to fury, and then eventual exhaustion. I was angry they hadn’t come to help me, but I also understood why. None of us were being paid enough to get stabbed.

For six years in Seattle, I was a social worker for a large non-profit homeless services agency. That’s where that incident occurred, along with many, many others.

The attempted stabbing wasn’t the only time I was attacked, but that was absolutely the worst. For the next three weeks, I’d arrive to work and immediately go to the bathroom, vomit out anything in my stomach, and then start my shift. Because this is how trauma works, I didn’t even notice anything strange about this sudden habit. It would just happen, and then I’d work, and then I’d return the next day and do the same thing again.

In fact, I didn’t realize anything was wrong with me until my boss found me crying in the corner of a side office, curled up in a fetal position. I didn’t even realize I was there, and didn’t understand why he was standing over me telling me to get up and go home.

What had happened that day, the day I finally understood I wasn’t well, was that they’d told me the guy who attacked me wasn’t being charged with a crime and would soon return to the shelter. He was homeless, and mentally-ill, and addicted to alcohol and several other drugs, and so all of that had “explained” why he’d attacked me. And though the policy was to enforce police no-contact protection orders against any client who attacked an employee, I was being asked not to enforce mine. By keeping myself safe, I’d be making the man sleep out on the streets, and that was of course an immoral thing.

In fact, the entire reason that incident had gone on for so long was that we weren’t allowed to use any force when being attacked. We were trained in avoiding and de-escalating physical conflicts, and were also told in no uncertain terms that any physical force against a client — even one trying to kill you — would result in termination and potential criminal charges.

So, by pushing my attacker away from me, I’d technically crossed that line. I was told I should have run away sooner, despite having no safe way to have done so.

The day my boss found me crying on the floor, he told me I should go talk to the Human Resources department. They, in turn, gave me the number of a contracted therapist to whom they sent employees having “trouble” dealing with the job. I expected little from the session, perhaps a prescribed week away from work at best.

I hadn’t expected her to tell me to quit my job.

“Listen,” she said, after I told her what had happened and what was happening to me. “I could give you medications for this, and you’ll feel better for a little while. But your employer sends me people like you all the time, and each time I tell them the same thing: you’re not being paid enough for this to happen to you.”

She was right. The pay wasn’t worth it. For the same amount, I could have been cooking, or standing behind a counter making coffee. For a little bit more, I could have been ringing up other people’s groceries. And for much, much more, I could have been answering customer service calls.

I could have been doing anything else. Instead, I was getting spat on, yelled at, attacked, harassed, and constantly degraded by the homeless, mentally-ill, and drug-addicted people I was working to help.

Despite knowing this, I actually argued with the therapist. “I’m doing some good there,” I said, but as the words left my mouth, they sounded hollow.

“There are other ways to do good in the world that don’t cause so much trauma.”

The work I did with that agency wasn’t always traumatic, wasn’t always violent, wasn’t always degrading. There were some beautiful moments, and some funny ones. There were shifts after which I went home smiling, feeling I’d done something really important for others.

Stories of tragedy turned to hope — and an inherited sense of Christian martyrdom — were what kept me hooked to that job. The guy who’d been 30 years on the bottle and 20 years on the street, now sober for two years with an apartment and even a job. Especially, there was one woman a social worker had found huddling behind dumpsters, smelling like a dead animal and clawing at him like a live, feral one. She’d become well enough to go to community college, and I was teaching her to garden.

There were beautiful stories, but those were really, really rare. More frequent — more everyday — were the ones of inhuman horror. I never could shut myself off from the monthly deaths from overdoses and liver failure, but especially hard were all the murders. Some were drug-fueled “accidents,” like when someone meant just to punch but instead killed. Some occurred during psychotic episodes or hallucinations, as when the old black man stomped repeatedly on the skull of the old Mexican man in a public area of the shelter. He’d been certain his victim was someone else, but still wouldn’t believe he’d killed the wrong guy when we could finally stop him. There was nothing left of the man’s face afterwards, and we’d had to scrape up his brains from the floor.

All this violence, this death, this horror, was all just part of the job. We were doing “good” in the world, but that therapist was right: there were other ways to do good without so much trauma.

I really haven’t thought much about my work there over the last few years. I wrote a bit about it in Here Be Monsters, citing the problems of its homelessness management model as a metaphor for larger problems with social justice frameworks. For a long time, I was able blissfully to forget I ever did that job, though I’ve had more and more reason to remember in the last few months.

I’ve been thinking about it especially in light of a recent event in New York City, the death of a homeless, mentally-ill man on a subway. I still get alerts from a few Antifa activists in the United States, a way to divine who will be their next ideological target. From one of them, I read something about a “white supremacist fascist vigilante” who’d “murdered an innocent black man” in New York, so I did a search to find out what had happened, and that’s why I’m thinking about all this again.

The dead man in question, Jordan Neely, died after three passengers subdued him. Specifically, a coroner ruled his death a homicide, caused by the choke-hold one of the men used to keep him immobile. That man, Daniel Penny, is the one Antifa activists are calling a “fascist vigilante.” Others — including Black Lives Matter leaders and Democrat politicians — are calling the event a “lynching.” Especially troublesome for many is the fact that Penny wasn’t immediately charged with murder, though a grand jury ruling which will determine if he should be charged is currently ongoing.

By all accounts, the dead man was quite mentally-ill. Reports on his history and previous arrests (including for assaulting an old woman and for kidnapping a 7-year old girl), as well as accounts of his previous aggression in public transit against other riders, give only partial context for what might have happened that day. Contrary to what you’d think from Antifa accounts, no evidence has yet turned up that the man who killed him, a former marine, was a white supremacist, fascist, or in any way aligned with such ideologies.

We can’t actually know what happened to Jordan Neely, because we weren’t there. Those who think they can be certain — especially the activists who believe Daniel Penny is a “fascist,” but also those on the other side convinced he must be innocent — are filtering the event through their own ideology.

This same problem of ideology occurs when people try to grasp the larger historical forces in which these incidents are situated. Mental illness, homelessness, increased crime in cities, problems with policing, increasing racial tensions, and even the ideological capture of entire sections of American society all affect events such as these, and no one’s got any coherent answers for them.

Even anti-capitalist leftists such as myself must admit this. Homelessness is certainly a product of capitalist property relations, but mental illness doesn’t go away just because you finally have a safe place to sleep. Jordan Neely’s mental instability was linked at least partially to the trauma from the horrific murder of his mother. Such things don’t get healed by universal basic income and affordable housing. And to be clear, they also don’t get healed by any of the pro-capitalist social justice solutions, either.

More so, it’s not clear what most leftists are really suggesting one do in such situations. Many of those certain Daniel Penny is a murderer state that Jordan Neely “needed help, not violence.” While this is quite a true statement, I wonder how many of them have actually been in such situations?

During the Occupy protest movement in Seattle, I was asked to give a training session for the leaders of the encampment on how to deal with homeless, mentally-ill people who were being violent. By the second week of the protests, about a third of the “residents” of the Occupy camp were homeless people, drawn there because so many supporters had donated tents. One of them tried to rape a young activist woman, others stole money, cameras, phones, and computers, and most of them were smoking crack, crystal meth, or both. Some of the leaders had heard I was a social worker dealing with precisely the same population, so they asked me to teach their security team how to de-escalate the problems while being sensitive to their economic and mental struggles.

The problems only increased, though, and the violence within the camp quickly drove away many of the less committed activists. As with the much later protest encampment in Seattle, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, internal violence involving drugs and mental-illness destabilized the movement just as much as police violence did.

American leftists and radicals don’t have any coherent or workable answers to these problems. Nor do European ones, either. Here in Luxembourg, which is only now starting to experience glimpses of late-stage capitalism’s societal collapse, the best anyone’s come up with is playing loud classical music to chase the drug dealers, drug users, homeless, and the mentally-ill a few blocks away from the train station. They’ve all moved now to the street where my favorite Turkish market resides, so I get accosted a minimum of twice each time I go buy my tea, my Lebanese flat breads, and my Aleppo soap.

Friends and strangers both have started frequently to remark aloud to me about the growing homeless population, as if asking me a question. I nod, and say: “it will only increase.” Just as it’s increased in America, almost double in Seattle as what it was when I first started working with the homeless there. Fentanyl wasn’t yet a thing back then, nor were tents set up on downtown streets, but of course the mental illness was always there.

To mention drugs and homelessness and mental illness all in the same sentence seems perhaps harsh, or misguided, or even a bit judgmental, as if I’m asserting they’re all the same thing. That’s not the case, but in the psychiatric language social workers often adopt, they’re common comorbidities. They often occur together, and feed into each other. Severe mental illness often leads to homelessness and to drug addiction. Homelessness often leads to mental illness and drug use. And drug addiction can make you mentally-ill if you were not already, and the more severe the addiction, the more likely you’ll end up on the streets.

Increasing treatment for mental illness and drug addiction would help, but it won’t end these problems. Increasing housing would go a very long way towards reducing homelessness, but it wouldn’t stop it altogether. None of those things, though, are really possible within a capitalist framework, and no socialist framework currently offers a realistic analysis of what’s actually happening, nor do most leftists ever soberly admit how dangerous a homeless, mentally-ill addict can be to others.

Not that liberals or conservatives offer anything better, of course. More prisons and more police won’t stop the acceleration of societal collapse, either.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been reading quite a bit about medieval Christian conceptions of magic and demons. What we call mental illness now was called demonic influence then, and though that religious explanation has fallen away, we’ve only really just changed the aesthetic. It’s still not clear to me we’ve come up with anything more coherent than what those societies did, especially since the current explosion of homelessness and mental illness now looks much like it did during the transition to capitalism.

The reason why someone threatens others on a subway in New York City now is “mental illness,” while back then it would have been “demons.” Neither answer is necessarily more right nor more wrong than the other, and they are both identical in one important way: they displace all agency away from the actor onto an invisible third.

I bring this up not to suggest this is wrong. On the contrary, I suspect we can only look at such things with an eye towards the unseen. As the author at Flat Caps and Fatalism said last year, “Demonology is a necessary mode of social explanation.” Mental illness is our new demonology, our new necessary mode, but there’s no important difference between that older mode and this one.

No leftist political framework we currently know could take seriously the implications of such an observation, anymore than they could offer coherent advice on what to do when encountering an unstable, potentially violent person. What do you do when a mentally-ill homeless man has you pinned up against the wall and is trying to stab you? What do you do when one tries to rape a young female activist in your protest encampment? What do you do when they hold a gun to you on the street in front of your partner’s home? And what do you do when you’re in a crowded subway car with no trained authorities to sweep in and take control of the situation?

No answer could possibly be correct, no matter how much faith we have in our ideological certainty. Trust me: trained social workers don’t really know what to do, either. Put them, or any activist, in these situations and they’ll act just like everyone else. Some will simply move away, some will pull out a camera, some will cower in a corner. Some might try to intervene, and that intervention may not turn out as they’d hope it would, and someone might die.

The only answer I can possibly give for this is the same one I give to every person here who mentions the increase in homelessness, of assaults by mentally-ill and/or drug addicted people: “it will only increase.” It will increase, and continue, and become so common that eventually we might let ourselves think a little more about what else is possible.