Spend time among Eau Claire’s homeless population and it doesn’t take long to see mental illness rear its ugly head.

 

Mental and emotional instability takes many forms. It showed itself in recent months via altercations at Sojourner House and emotional outbursts at Positive Avenues. It surfaced one day at The Community Shelter, an Eau Claire soup kitchen that serves meals daily to people in need, when a homeless person with obsessive compulsive disorder stuffed the toilet there with rolls of toilet paper, prompting it to clog.

 

It was a major component of the many interactions Eau Claire police working the downtown beat had with the city’s homeless residents this winter. It was evident when one rough-looking bearded man wiped his feces on a downtown building one February day.

 

It occurred in the form of people who, no matter how cold the weather during Eau Claire’s historically cold winter of 2013-14, spent nights in subzero weather in vehicles or under bridges or on benches or in the city parking ramp or just walking because they were unable to be around other people for any length of time.

 

Unfortunately, instances of mental illness among homeless residents in Eau Claire and elsewhere are all too common, mental health professionals and members of local agencies that work with homeless residents said. Between 20 and 25 percent of homeless people in the U.S. are diagnosed with some form of severe and persistent mental illness, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C. Many others suffer from less-obvious but still-debilitating mental health problems, experts said.

 

“The mental health part of the homeless equation is huge,” said Sue Howe, program supervisor with Positive Avenues, an Eau Claire drop-in center for people with mental health issues that is overseen by Lutheran Social Services. “So many homeless people are dealing with one mental health issue or another. We see lots of it here.”

 

Mental disorders tend to not only make people more likely to become homeless but often prevent them from carrying out essential aspects of basic care, officials at Eau Claire agencies that serve the city’s homeless population said. Homeless people with mental health issues often remain homeless for longer than their counterparts who aren’t mentally ill. They have a tougher time landing jobs and often are in worse physical health. They also tend to have more run-ins with the law, prompting stints in jail and fines that make the climb from homelessness even more daunting.

 

“When you’re homeless and living on the edge, any one thing can really set you back,” said Kelly Christianson, executive director of the Beacon House shelter that provides shelter and services to homeless families. “Then, when you add the mental health issues many of these people deal with, it makes everything more difficult.”

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Many people with mental health issues turn to drugs and alcohol to dull their sorrows, often becoming addicted in the process. Others do it simply to cope with their desperate situations. Christopher Sperry and his girlfriend, Lisa Sundberg, lost their home in December after Sundberg convinced Sperry to give up dealing drugs. The couple decided to give up the marijuana and methamphetamine they used too. Or at least they tried to.

 

When times got tough last winter, or when Sperry, 29, and Sundberg, 31, just felt like having a good time amid the struggles of homelessness, they periodically fell back to their old ways, going on periodic drug-fueled benders. One of them lasted for three days, they acknowledged.

 

“We were bangin’ it, partying hard,” the affable Sperry said. They weren’t the only ones. On various occasions in recent months small packs of the city’s homeless population gathered outside the building near Banbury Place that houses The Community Table and Positive Avenues, inhaling drugs to get high, otherwise known as huffing. One early evening a woman stood in the shadows of a building along Galloway Street, shooting up heroin.

 

Larry Coleman, who came to Wisconsin 14 years ago to escape the drug-infested Chicago neighborhood he called home and eventually made his way to Eau Claire, acknowledged periodic drug use outside the building. Coleman, a volunteer at Positive Avenues, and others at the agency work with police to discourage the activity, he said.

 

“A lot of these people struggle with mental illness,” said Coleman, 58, “and they’re desperate for an escape from their problems. So they use drugs and alcohol.”

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Never mind his shaggy, shoulder-length hair. Never mind his scruffy beard or missing teeth. Fred Stephens is a friendly sort, the kind of guy who amicably greets those around him, the sort who extends his arm for a handshake and asks, with a smile and glint in his eye, how you’re doing.

 

But Stephens, 59, who has spent most of the past 15 years homeless in Eau Claire, has another side, a side that sends him spiraling into soul-searing sadness as he contemplates the parts of his oftentimes difficult past he’d just as soon forget.

 

His mind floods with thoughts of the hateful verbal abuse he has endured. He recoils with shame and disgust at the physical and sexual assaults of his youth. He has difficulty determining reality from imagined events. He is burdened with opportunities squandered after he was discharged from the Army and spent the next decade or so as a street musician playing along Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, ingesting and smoking and shooting up nearly every drug that came along. Sometimes Stephens’ mind just plain doesn’t work right, having been damaged by drugs and alcohol.

 

“I took hundreds of acid trips,” he said. “I did so many drugs I can’t begin to remember it all. A lot of that is just a big blur.”

 

In Stephens’ worst moments — those times when the thoughts in his mind swirl out of control, mixing in fuzzy patterns like a helter-skelter kaleidoscope, when the horrors and failures of his past come to visit like uninvited ghosts — he contemplates leaving this life for another place. “Sometimes I imagine myself going into another world and I don’t care if I come back,” Stephens said.

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Bleak as it seems, attempted suicides aren’t uncommon among Eau Claire’s homeless residents. During this winter and spring several among the city’s homeless population told the Leader-Telegram they attempted to overdose on prescription drugs and were hospitalized after doing so. One homeless man bedeviled by addiction died of a drug overdose, they said.

 

Unable to cope with being homeless after being kicked out of her apartment Dec. 31 and battling a history of mental and emotional instability, Annette Johnson overdosed on prescription drugs multiple times during the past four months, winding up in Eau Claire’s Sacred Heart Hospital. She took too many drugs, she said, to ensure her removal from the Sojourner House shelter where she struggled to stay. But she took them for another reason as well, she said.

 

“My life is a mess,” Johnson, 49, said one cloudy April day. “Sometimes I don’t see any hope. I don’t see a way out of my troubles and I just want to end it all.”

 

This year wasn’t the first time Johnson tried to take her own life. In October 2012 she and her partner, Paul Palmquist, 52, decided to end their lives together. They ingested way too many prescription drugs and lay down together to die.

 

The duo survived, barely. Palmquist required a couple of months to learn to walk again. He still walks with an awkward gait.

 

“I’m glad I lived, but it’s not like my life has gotten an easier,” a downcast Palmquist said recently.

 

Other Eau Claire homeless citizens admitted they contemplate killing themselves in their darkest moments. One frigid late-March day after he had been shown the door at Sojourner House the previous night because the shelter was packed beyond capacity, John Lawton sat at the Perkins restaurant on Eau Claire’s east side, wondering if he should drink himself to death.

 

Lawton, 39, had tried to drink himself to death before. One day in his mid-20s he consumed liquor until his vision blurred and he blacked out. He woke up in a hospital bed, lucky to be breathing. Last summer Lawton pondered another deadly drinking binge but decided against it. “I decided to stay alive, at least for now,” he said.

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Kirk Brown knows how depression and extreme anxiety can prompt suicidal thoughts. Suffering from bipolar and post traumatic stress disorders and depression, the 21-year Navy veteran tried to kill himself by overdosing on oxycontin in January 2010 after he lost his job and his wife left him, taking the couple’s daughter with her.

 

Four years later, Brown is alive. He has struggled for much of that time, receiving mental health diagnoses and staying at veterans hospitals for counseling and treatment. Sometimes he takes medications to treat depression and post traumatic stress and bipolar disorders. Sometimes he doesn’t.

 

Brown eventually made his way to Eau Claire, where he worked at American Phoenix before losing that job, and a place to live, in June 2012. He wound up at Eau Claire’s Sojourner House shelter for a time before moving in with a friend in August. These days, things are looking up for Brown, at least a bit.

 

“It’s taken some time, but I’ve been able to renew my spirit a bit,” Brown said. “Now I’m trying to find a job. I’m trying to get my life back.”

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Stephens is trying to get a grip on his life too, or, as he calls it, “get on the good side.” But doing so has proven challenging. He said he was diagnosed with seven mental conditions 15 years ago when he arrived in Eau Claire for treatment after he found himself staring down the business end of an assault rifle one summer day in 1999 at his rural Phillips property in northern Wisconsin. Authorities broke into his house and arrested him for joining forces with Milwaukee drug lords and growing lots of marijuana.

 

“Getting busted for dealing drugs was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Stephens said. “It started me on the path to living a better life.”

 

That doesn’t mean the last 15 years have been smooth sailing for Stephens. His story is one filled with more ups and downs than a roller coaster ride, more twists and turns than a soap opera plot.

 

He has been in and out of alcohol and drug treatment more times than he can recall. He’s had an unending number of psychological evaluations and counseling sessions. He’s had continued run-ins with law enforcement as he struggles to live the straight and narrow life. In early February he violated terms of his probation when he was disorderly with police who found him in possession of marijuana. On April 28 he was cited for having an open alcohol container on the streets.

 

“It’s in and out, in and out,” Stephens said. “It’s a cycle for me. I use and then I get healthy again, then I use. It’s really a horrible life.”

 

For the past decade-and-a-half, Stephens hasn’t had a house of his own. He estimates taxpayers have spent about $1.5 million for his care during that time.

 

Still, he hasn’t given up hope, not completely. He wants to speak to high schoolers and others about the dangers of alcohol and drugs. He wants to educate them about the life he has lived. He wants to help them take a different path.

 

“I want to make a positive difference somehow,” he said. “I don’t want to screw up again. I’m getting too old for that kind of thing. I’m running out of time.” Emerson can be reached at 715-830-5911, 800-236-7077 or julian.emerson@ecpc.com.