Dear Providers-nim,
The cookie cutter, one size fits all, is futile. Expecting clients/patients to make appointments and keep them is ludicrous. Cognitive functionality is at a bare minimum, and priorities are reduced to their only one – survive. Ok, maybe that is a bit embellished! When searching for typical profile characteristics of our HADs (homeless addiction disorders), those are a couple common components for you. Yes, there are many more typical traits and behaviors. It’s the person inside of these that matters though, and that is who needs our help.
Each person out there is dealing with a set of circumstances as unique as your fingerprint or my voice print. Their complex state of mind and biopsychosocial condition is unidentifiable via facial recognition or any other superficial investigatory assessment, evaluation, or screening tool. Get to know their inner being! As we’ve mentioned already, walk in their moccasins for a spell, learn who they’ve hidden deep down inside, and assure them you’ll not hurt them.
As for trusting you, as their provider, that’s off the table for a while! Maybe dew drops of trust will appear, somewhere along the way, so long as there is no perceived threat to their established survival methods and strategies. After all, they know they are still breathing and have a pretty good idea of how and why. Smothering them will be counterproductive, imposing our will is counterproductive, thinking we have their resolution is disrespectful, maybe even a bit offensive. Even if you or we do have a viable resolve, their trepidation will surface as treatment resistance. You see, for a remission process to work, clients have to own it because they volitionally chose to own it. If it belongs to a program or provider, that just becomes another set of chains that bind and control.
Last Brief featured views from one of our community’s providers some twenty years ago. Much of his dialogue continues to hold water today. Toward the end of that video, Ken mentions the potential social affirmation has to facilitate healing, remission, and persuade change. It’s the same influential medicine found in our self-help groups, as evidenced by research (link). To disenfranchise ill members of our community is like providing vinegar in lieu of water for their dehydration.
Kind Regards, LaBranche, PhD.
P.S. if you haven’t figured out the hyphenated nim, it’s because it’s a cultural thing!
Flowers and Bees are true Providers.
We all must provide in order to stay alive.
Some may only have a weak pulse to give.
A few, blessed with wealth, choose to hide.
They hide in mansions, missing life’s meaning.
Materially you can have it all and still fall.
Providing you pay, you will be provided for.
These stipulations, you cannot legally ignore.
We bestow insurers with the power to dispense.
Some like to call them the administrators.
Others, look at them like blackjack dealers.
Life the gamble; some work hard, and still loose,
and some are just born lucky.
No matter what cards you’re dealt, in the end—
All will fold.
While you are still at the table, I recommend sharing;
Food, Water, Oxygen, Shelter, and Caring.
richard ebner 2026
William Tell:
Do check out a couple of our local providers; tell them Doc sent you! Services – Living Waters Center of Hope & Lowell Alliance & Institute for Health and Recovery
And, thank you Bill, once again Ms. Gilbert too, for an awesome article concerning stigma and disenfranchisement of our psychologically challenged HADs (homeless addiction disorders). We’ve shared how the current unhoused situation is rooted in the deinstitutionalization of the mid-nineteen-sixties. The situation is evidently exacerbated by criminalizing addiction disorders too, recalled by the Lowell Sun recently – innocent homeless elderly encampment abolished. That was back in 2023.
The more profound words though, still resonating with us, are about our community’s HHS department, according to Melanie’s quote from Mr. Golden: “has made it a priority to protect the city’s unhoused populations.” “Well, well, well, three holes in the ground,” as Franny Foye was fond of saying. Are there different unhoused populations? We’ve watched two wonderful empty buildings go freely, perfectly located and exceptionally designed too, for housing our HADs. Done as a research project of course. You know, color within the lines!
Well, the potential Hurd Street homeless shelter seems to have no lines for coloring, just a claim of some seventy million for conversion to mixed housing units. What is that, a rabbit hole – mixed housing? Second well, apparently, we have nearly two million from our potential Gorham Street research encampment from that superior building. Which hole, in whose pocket will that try to fill? And finally, let’s look down the last well! Is there a warm dry place yet for housing our HADs by snowfall, please?