David_42
Registered Democrat.
- Aug 9, 2015
- 3,616
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We need to do more for those in need..
Heartbreaking photos and tragic tales of San Francisco's homeless
Heartbreaking photos and tragic tales of San Francisco's homeless
Mary "told me she had once been very beautiful, but that was a long time ago." Photographs by Robert Okin
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Jeff rarely smiles. After 10 years sleeping on sidewalks in San Francisco, stealing to survive and score his next heroin fix, an infection robbed him of most of his teeth. "If you have a big nose, well, no one can blame you," he says. "It's just the way you were born. But if you have no teeth, it's proof that you've fucked up real bad—that you must be nothing but a fuckup."
He wasn't always this way, but his life was hard from the beginning. Jeff spent his early years fearing his mother would kill him. She suffered from delusions and was shuffled in and out of mental health facilities. Sometimes she was violent, hurling insults and threatening her family with knives.
Jeff's father, though, was his hero. He was a garbage collector—"the best in the city"—and Jeff followed in his footsteps: "I became a garbage collector too. I worked and paid taxes for 12 years. But one day I was caught with a tiny bit of pot in my urine and was fired on the spot."
It was devastating. Jeff fell into a deep depression. He started using crack, and later heroin. Soon, he had burned through his money, lost his apartment, and was abandoned by his fiancé. "Being a garbage man was everything to me. When I lost that, I lost everything."
A social worker helped Jeff get off drugs and into stable housing: "Maybe I'll live 'til 50."
Jeff's is one of the many stories of homelessness chronicled in Robert Okin's new book Silent Voices. As a psychiatrist who has served as the Commissioner at the Department of Mental Health in both Massachusetts and Vermont, a professor emeritus at the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine, and former Chief of Service in the San Francisco General Hospital's Department of Psychiatry, Okin has worked with homeless patients throughout his career.
Still, as he passed them daily on the streets of the city where he lived and worked, he began to wonder about who they really were. How did they cope with their stresses, what did they think about, and how did they make it through the cold, foggy San Francisco nights? "I understood their lives from a clinical point of view. I didn’t really get it from a humanistic point of view," Okin told me. "I wanted to know about the details."
So, he started asking. He would broach conversations on street corners, inquiring about street people's pasts, survival strategies, and inner lives. "Behind the rags and the carts and the strange behaviors—behind the stigma of poverty and mental illness—are human beings with a lot of the same hopes and feelings, joys, frustrations that the rest of us have," he says. "I wanted to help readers see that, when they pass someone on the street who is sleeping, they should try to remember: That person has a story."
Daniel, in the financial district, panhandles by day and sleeps in doorways at night.
Daniel's feet.
In the book, Okin pairs photographic portraits with extended quotes from his subjects, offering context only when needed. He'd rather let his readers experience the stories as he did. Not surprisingly, they are full of hardship, grief, and regret. "Many believed that they were at fault for their own predicaments," Okin says. "Even when you heard the stories that these people had—abused, neglected. Many of them just never had a chance."
Some people wouldn't engage with Okin: "I sat beside him for over an hour. He seemed completely unaware of my presence, so intently was he examining his sock."
Drug addiction is a common theme. People started using for a variety of reasons, especially those who experienced neglect or abuse. Once they landed on the streets, they were caught in a perpetual cycle. Addictions are particularly hard to break when you don't have a roof over your head, Okin says. As one subject puts it, "Living on the street is so bad, you have to be either stoned or crazy to bear it."
In his 20s, David became convinced extraterrestrial creatures were shooting particles into his brain: "The angels of suffering are screeching at me!"
