Menu Item: Climbing Back

Brad Swenson was having a bad week. He and his wife were bickering. He didn’t get along with his supervisor at the Lucky distribution center in La Habra where he processed orders. On the way home from work one Friday, he stopped for a beer at Cliff’s Hideaway in La Palma.

The beer got him thinking how unhappy he was and that led to a few double Bloody Marys. “I got wasted,” he says, “then I decided I wanted to go get high.” Swenson got a motel room and hit the crack pipe for two weeks straight. “I smoked up my savings, checking account, overdrafts. I lost everything,” he says.

It wasn’t the first time. With nowhere to sleep, Swenson found an old carpet behind a karate studio in Artesia and rolled up inside. After a few days, he wandered into an encampment of fellow crack addicts under a Long Beach freeway overpass, where he slept on a stained mattress. One night he wound up crashing at a nearby crack house. He was there when the Long Beach police kicked down the door.

For the next three months and 20 days, Swenson had a place to stay, the same place that houses hundreds of people with mental illness on any given day: Los Angeles’ Twin Towers jail. While he was there, recovering-addicts-turned-counselors from a place in Long Beach called the Village invited him into their program. Ever since, he says, his life has begun to make sense.

Most of the people who wind up living on the streets have mental illness, addictions or both. Because society doesn’t know what to do with them, or doesn’t care, these sick people are battered by disease, criminals and their own demons. The rest of us pay a high price in social services they use, while we also endure an ongoing assault on civic pride. Plenty of public and private organizations grapple with the problem of people temporarily left without housing by poverty, abuse or bad luck. Swenson lucked into one of the few places that take on the hard-core cases.

The Village is headquartered in a three-story building not far from Long Beach’s bustling upscale heart. There’s a laundry in the basement, a deli, catering business and drop-in center at street level, and counselors on the top floors. It’s clean, well-lighted and cheerful throughout--despite the fact that human misery is its stock in trade. Here, teams of social workers, psychiatrists and counselors offer “menus” of housing, employment, treatment and social activities to “members” who span the spectrum of society’s psychologically wounded--from severely mentally ill adults to disturbed young people who’ve just begun to cycle in and out of jails.

For Swenson, the first menu course was obvious. He enrolled in a place called “Wisdom House,” where he wrestled down his addictions. Even more important, it was at the Village that a psychiatrist told him for the first time that the lifelong mood swings that had repeatedly left him enraged and impoverished had a biological cause and a name: bipolar disorder. Swenson began taking medication. A counselor helped him find an apartment. Another helped him find a job as a maintenance worker. Few people with the “dual diagnosis” of mental illness and addiction climb straight back to stability, and Swenson, indeed, tumbled into relapse. But this time he had a safety net to catch him, and the Village put him back on course.

Each person like Swenson accepted into the Village costs Los Angeles County $18,000. That’s not cheap, but neither is letting people set up camp on sidewalks. A recent University of Pennsylvania study found that the average person with mental illness living on the streets of New York used emergency medical systems, jails and other public services such as community psychiatric clinics--sporadically and ultimately ineffectively--to the tune of just over $40,000 a year.

The alternative to such waste is the Village, a model program that Los Angeles County needs to replicate widely so that people like Swenson get the support that helps them hold their lives together and strive for an independence that lets them disappear back into the mainstream. Indeed, Village members like Swenson may have handed you a canape at a catered civic event or sold you groceries. Where you won’t find them is on a public sidewalk, growling at imagined demons.

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Thursday: “Cuckoo’s Nest” revisited: A Thanksgiving recipe for how you can help. And what should happen when all else fails.