ChosenFast.com

I wrote about the guys on the block (and more) for the News & Record: “When there’s nowhere to go,” by Michele Forrest; published Sunday, Nov. 1, 2009.  It’s online here, and reposted below:

On the block. Image credit: Michele Forrest / ChosenFast.com

My ministry partner, Audrie Keen, and I provide a street outreach to the homeless in Greensboro, and we’ve made a lot of friends along the way. We eat together, go to church together and have cookouts. Sometimes our homeless friends stay with us. We visit formerly homeless friends in their homes.

When we say “homeless friends,” we really mean friends.

Two Friday mornings ago, we visited “The Block” at Lee and South Eugene streets. It had been 11 days since my last visit, when we’d talked about the artistic bench installed, then removed, from along the new stretch of the Downtown Greenway in that area. Neighbors said the bench attracted drug addicts and prostitutes.

The guys on The Block dismissed that notion. One said: “The problem is not as serious as they say it is on the news. And the bench has nothing to do with it.”

Read more on When there’s nowhere to go…

Good editorial in today’s News & Record: “Clearing out The Block”:

Greensboro police last week stepped up loitering enforcement and effectively cleared the place known as “The Block.” Just like that.

Read more on N&R Editorial: Clearing out The Block…

Today is National Depression Screening Day. Click here for a list of screening locations in Greensboro.

Or take an online screening from NYU’s Langone Medical Center.  Click here. If your screening indicates that you need a psychiatric consultation, click here for Greensboro, or click here for a national affiliate network, that can help you find a provider.

Read more on Today is depression screening day: Find a location…

Did you read News & Record editorial page editor Allen Johnson’s Sunday, October 4, 2009 column? Read it online: My conflicted views about panhandlers.

Allen writes in response to the heavily restrictive changes to the city’s panhandling ordinance, which have made it illegal to panhandle almost everywhere downtown, and have limited panhandling throughout the city. Allen talks about why he has mixed feelings about panhandlers.

Read more on Allen Johnson: Conflicted about panhandlers…

Be sure to read Lorraine Ahearn’s News & Record article, “Benches highlight a bigger problem”, which begins like this:

“The location of artistic benches, which were removed from the Downtown Greenway on Friday after neighbors complained, looked good on paper but ignored some basic urban topography. Just a stone’s throw from where the benches were removed, amid complaints that they drew drunken and lewd behavior, sits ‘The Block.’ At the southwest corner of Eugene and Lee streets, at the entrance to HealthServe clinic and Greensboro Urban Ministry’s night shelter, this stretch of sidewalk has been a magnet for loitering, drugs and prostitution for 20 years….”

The benches were never the problem, so removing them won’t solve it. The problem on the block is primarily addiction. People drink there, and buy and smoke pot and crack. And where you find crack, you find dealers and prostitutes.

Read more on Bilbro benches gone, next target: homeless on the block?…

Facebook status, today, 5:00 a.m.:

“Hard to sleep. Depression hurts everywhere. Makes other pain, illness and injury harder to bear. I hope today will be a better day. Why status this? I have a major depressive disorder — a chronic, disabling illness of the brain. There should be no stigma or shame attached. Time to speak out.”

[video link]

Read more on Me, depression & Facebook: Tell it…

From MHA-NC:

As part of the 2009 HBO Documentary Film Series, HBO will be airing Boy Interrupted on Monday, August 3^rd.

Boy Interrupted, directed by Dana Perry, tells the heartbreaking true story of Evan Perry, a 15-year-old boy who jumped to his death from his New York City bedroom after a life of struggling with bipolar disorder. A 2009 Sundance Film Festival selection, this documentary recounts Evan’s life and death in the words of his parents, who are also the filmmakers.

Read more on Monday, Aug. 3rd, HBO airs “Boy Interrupted” doc: Mental illness takes a child…

Living with mental illness is hard. But having caring, supportive relationships in your life is a comfort and a help. Volunteers with the Mental Health Association in Greensboro’s Compeer program provide those relationships. What a blessing that is.

Read more on Compeers: Caring relationships provide support for people with mental illness…

There is wisdom in the saying, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, it’s the presence of justice.” But a lot of days, I’d be satisfied just to go from sunup to sundown with no drama.  Rarely happens, though.

Read more on An acceptable peace? Stop and think……

I can’t do this. I don’t know how to help anybody. People drowning in the bottle. People trapped in addiction. People tortured by mental illness. People being beaten. People getting raped. People going to jail and prison. People haunted by childhood trauma and abuse. People overwhelmed by lifetimes of tragedies, one after the after. People with nowhere to live, nowhere to go, nowhere to be. All around me — a human tidal wave of pain, pain, pain.

Read more on I can’t do this…

This is the song on my lips and in my heart these days — a song of hope and healing, a song that restores and refills me when the flood of pain around me threatens to overwhelm my soul:

Read more on I will rise: The anchor when my heart and flesh fail…

Betty Ann Scott stayed at our church’s women’s emergency shelter for a while this winter.  She had medical problems, mental illness and an addiction disorder.  Shelter staff and volunteers reached out for help for Betty Ann.  At a special dinner marking the close of the winter shelter this past week, residents paused to remember Betty Ann, who died shortly after leaving Grace’s shelter and being placed in a community-based residential program for the homeless mentally ill.  The News & Record’s Lorraine Ahearn writes about mental health reform, Betty Ann’s death, and the system that failed to protect her:

Read more on Homeless, addicted, mentally ill: The death of Betty Ann Scott…