They buried Steve Staggs this week

If you go to this link on mental health care, you'll understand how we arrived where we are when it comes to the mentally ill and homeless. It will also help you to understand how timing is everything, considering when these events happened, it was at the same time Vietnam veterans were in dire need of the mental health community.

http://www.sociology.org/content/vol003.004/thomas.html

I found this on VAWatchdog, one of the best sites out there on veterans. It's about what we don't often enough read about when we talk about homeless veterans. Steve Staggs was a homeless veteran and he died as a homeless veteran, buried in a popper's grave. One more discard from a family that didn't care? Hardly. He had a family caring about him, trying to help him and searched for him after he walked away. They were still searching for him two years after he had been buried in a grave with just some numbers as a marker for the day his body was found.

Please read this and then come back for what I have to say. It won't matter as much unless you see a homeless veteran thru the eyes of someone who loved him.

Laurie Roberts' Columns & Blog

A mother's son finally laid to rest



They buried Steve Staggs this week.

Old soldiers were there and an honor guard detail which offered a three-volley salute and sounded Taps. The Patriot Guard Riders came and the Old Guard Riders, too, standing in formation for more than an hour there in the mid-morning sun as Steve's family laid him, finally, to rest.

Steve didn't die in a war. At least, not the conventional kind. During his last days, most of us probably would have crossed the street to avoid him. We would have seen the homeless man battling mental illness from the empty end of a vodka bottle. We would have seen the disheveled man who shunned help. We would have seen and we would have walked on, never catching a glimpse of the real Steve Staggs.

The man who served his country. The one who was somebody's son, somebody's brother. Somebody's father.

“He was a very religious person in his heart,” his mother, Barbara Larson, told me after Monday's service. “This would have meant so much to him.”

Steve battled depression for most of his 44 years, but he was much more than a man with a mental illness. He served for a decade in the Coast Guard and later worked in the private sector until an accident left him with a head injury.

By 2004, he was no longer able to work and tried several times to commit suicide. He was in and out of hospitals as his family tried to get him help but you have to want help and even then, in this state, that's no guarantee that you'll get it.

Steve, sadly, didn't want help. In the fall of 2006, he threw his belongings in the trash, picked up his backpack and walked away from everything and everyone he knew. For 2½ years, his family searched for him, fueled by that spark of hope that maybe someday he would be found. In March, that spark was extinguished. Steve's body had been found two years earlier in a field in Surprise, lying under a salt-cedar tree, surrounded by empty vodka bottles.

It took two years before anyone realized that the body was the long sought Steve, well loved by some despite how he might have looked to the rest of us. By the time his family found him, he'd long ago been buried by jail inmates in the county pauper's cemetery.
go here for more
http://www.vawatchdog.org/09/nf09/nfjun09/nf062509-2.htm

Mental hospitals were never very good but at least the mentally ill were not left to live or die on their own. Today there are some half-way houses addressing recovery from drugs and alcohol, some shelters for the homeless, but considering reports about neighbors complaining about their property values and "not wanting those people living in my neighborhood" the likelihood of an adequate number of them to take care of all of our citizens needing help, is not about to happen anytime soon.

During WWII, one of my husband's uncles was a Merchant Marine. He was on a ship hit by a Kamikaze pilot and never really recovered. He was not left to wander the streets. He was sent to live on a farm so that he and others were cared for, to live out their lives provided with everything they needed. Even back then, there were not enough places for all of them to go and many ended up in Mental Hospitals. Instead of investing in fixing what was wrong with these facilities, they were shut down. It seems that President Reagan had better uses for tax payer funds resulting in the mentally ill walking the streets, left to suffer without care and die there.

In the long run, not fixing the hospitals for the mentally ill, cost more money than anyone was prepared for. What resulted was not only the increase in homeless, it increased crimes and incarcerations. This resulted in the need to build more prisons. When we provided nothing for the mentally ill, we put suffering people into dangerous positions and then they became more dangerous to the rest of society.

Veterans, with their unique circumstances, joined the ranks of the mentally ill and homeless. The same outcome for these veterans was guaranteed. One of them was almost my husband. Almost, simply because the homeless shelter had a waiting list and there was no way I could face our daughter knowing I put her father out to live on the streets. Looking back on the full shelter, I now consider it a blessing because I became more determined to make sure it never reached that point again.

All the years I had been researching PTSD and helping veterans, left me feeling totally lost and helpless because no matter what I said, what I did, how I acted, I couldn't get my own husband to listen and get the proper help. I stood by him as he entered into private rehabs, joined AA and then watched him sink right back down into the abyss. It was easier for him to accept being called an alcoholic than it was to accept the term associated with mental illness. The fear was greater for him to have PTSD, partly because he still couldn't understand it enough to get his preconceived concepts out of his head, and partly because he didn't think he knew anyone with the same illness. He did however know a lot of "alcoholics" or so he thought. It turned out most of the people he knew that were "just drunks like him" were also PTSD veterans.

Because of this, I ended up visiting the shelter and my heart was tugged by the full capacity of sheltered veterans. This was in the 90's, long before Afghanistan and Iraq veterans were coming back needing help for the same wound. The first tour I took, I was hopeful when I saw how there were doctors and nurses, dentists, all volunteering their time along with mental health providers, trainers and teachers. These veterans were not just being provided with shelter and food, but hope. I had a good feeling until I reached the floor for female veterans. It was there I was told there would be a lot more of them on that floor, but they couldn't take in children. Female homeless veterans with children were sent away.

Over the years, a lot of people have complained to me that I care more about homeless veterans than I do regular citizens. In a way, that's true. It is not that my heart is cold to the plight of all homeless people, it is simply tugged more by our veterans. It is also because they are a minority among the homeless as well as a minority in this nation.

National Coalition for Homeless Veterans - Background & ...
Conservatively, one out of every three homeless men who is sleeping in a ... NCHV strongly believes that all programs to assist homeless veterans

While we are a nation of over 300 million, there are less than 30 million veterans, even less are combat veterans. These are the men and women we counted on, depended on them to risk their lives fighting the battles we decided needed to be fought. It was also us deciding that when they came home, they would just have to go back to being a civilian and left to fend for themselves, unless they happened to have body parts blown off. Those were the only wounds we were willing to accept as any excuse to have our tax dollars used to take care of them. TBI? PTSD? Agent Orange? Gulf War Syndrome? What more did these people want from us? After all, we already have mental health care, cancer treatments and research being done for the rest of us. Why do they expect to be treated any differently than the rest of us? Isn't that what financial junkies use for excuses to do nothing for them?

I can't use "Republican" for this because some of them actually do understand the obligation we have to our veterans, but too many under the "conservative" or "libertarian" banner are more like greedy junkies wanting to hold onto every dime they have, using the social system instead of acknowledging how much they need it all. Safe food and water, roads, bridges, fire departments, police departments, the list goes on but they fail to see where their money goes. They were also the same people standing on the floor of congress saying that taking care of the veterans was something they couldn't afford because there were two wars to pay for. Amazing isn't it? At the same time they took no issue with anything President Bush wanted to spend for Iraq and Afghanistan, they complained about having to take care of the men and women that were participating in it. I often wonder what their attitude would be if they had someone in their own family needing the help of the VA or wounded by PTSD if they would feel the same way?

This is why homeless veterans are very different to me. While they are just like us in many ways, they are also very different in other ways. While we don't risk our lives for anyone, they do. When they end up with life altering events as veterans for the rest of their lives, it's up to us to fulfill our end of the deal for them. The problem is, it's just not personal to the rest of us.

My eye opener on PTSD came when I met a Vietnam veteran I fell in love. My eye opener on homeless veterans came when a shelter was full. It was all personal to me and still is. If it hasn't been personal to you up to this point, then I hope the story you read about Steve Staggs managed to change your heart a little bit anyway.

A lot of people in this country were not really paying attention to what was happening in Iran until the image of Neda dying on the street made the national news. Then, it was personal to us because we thought about how an innocent person could be killed like that. Maybe Steve Staggs can make homeless veterans personal to you as well and move you to care about strangers.