This commentary is by Will Eberle of Northfield. He is executive director of the Vermont Association of Mental Health and Addiction Recovery and Recovery Vermont, and the founder of Mission Driver Consulting.
Seven Days recently ran a cover story called “The Fight for Decker Towers.” This did an excellent job of bringing attention to the scope and urgency of our homelessness, mental health and substance use disorder crises in Vermont. This article helps to foster much-needed awareness and a sense of urgency so often lacking in our discussion of these topics, and I applaud this critical reporting.
But, when we refer to people living with acute trauma striving to overcome extraordinary challenges amid the panopticon of public scorn and condemnation as “drug users” and “homeless people,” we reduce their complex humanity, identities and experiences to pejoratives. We put a target on people’s backs who need our support, not our ire. When we instead talk about “people who use drugs” and “people experiencing homelessness” we acknowledge that these behaviors and challenges are just one element of complex circumstances and not a shorthand for identity.
Readers of “The Fight for Decker Towers” would be forgiven for concluding our systems are broken. The sad truth is that our systems are working perfectly. They’re doing exactly what they were designed to do: provide a limited amount of support within rigid and arbitrary eligibility and budget limitations that falls far short of what’s actually needed to save and transform lives. This ensures Vermonters without political and social capital never get enough of either to demand we invest in what would actually help at the scale needed to resolve the dystopian inequities we have accepted as normal.
Our communities do not get safer, cleaner, friendlier, more vibrant, when we relegate the hardest off to the shadows, guard them from entering whatever warm and dry nook and cranny they can find, condemn them for displaying the symptoms of the medical condition of substance use disorder or the attributes of mental health challenges. Things will only get worse until we admit that we have designed and carefully maintained a system which holds up the suffering of those who we tell ourselves have made the wrong “choices” as a mirror to reflect back our own virtue.
We have become inured to what should be a soul-crushing display of suffering and inequity, to what should be a call to action. But instead of acting, we placate ourselves with our favorite tale of make believe:
Vermont’s version of capitalism and democracy are working. We can’t just give people what they need to survive, to thrive — it must be earned. Those who make their lives bastions of conscientiousness should have markedly better lives than those who spend their time and money doing the “wrong” things.
And how will we know we have won for being “right”? When others who are “wrong” lose. When they suffer — badly, visibly — unmistakably.
We cannot treat or police our way out of co-occurring conditions scaffolded on intergenerational poverty. We cannot expect people who have been traumatized by systems of power and people who wield it to engage in services and supports until those we serve can set their own goals and determine what that support looks like, until those supports are offered by people who look like them, have been through the same things as them, are willing to talk about their own challenges.
We cannot neglect and ignore our most vulnerable neighbors day after day and then be surprised when crippling, preventable chronic health conditions or arctic temperatures force them into emergency departments where we often spend tens of thousands of dollars per night on interventions far too late to produce stable health and wellness.
We cannot spend almost a hundred thousand dollars per year to incarcerate people then return them right back to the same conditions that led to their previous crimes and be surprised when they soon return to incarceration.
If we don’t make an investment and policy shift toward long-term holistic supports for our most vulnerable Vermonters, we will stay on a crash course with a scale of mental health and substance use crises — and homelessness and suicide and overdose — so stunning that we’ll look back on our current record levels of all of the same as a fond memory.
But we can fix this. To do so, we must shift from a fight between “us versus them” to “a fight for us.” We can live in the Vermont we all dream of once we finally bring ourselves to invest at scale in permanent supported housing, shelter capacity, overdose prevention centers, harm reduction and recovery supports, mental health peer support and outreach, and supported employment.
Take it from one who has eaten out of dumpsters and slept in alleyways and overpasses and wrestled demons and substance use: The people forced to live in their own excrement in clouds of pepper spray in stairwells are not a problem to solve. They are people. They are in need of our love and support. They have complex needs and identities. They have goals and dreams and gifts to offer the world. Realizing them is a win for us all. It is the business of ladders and bridges, not fences and handcuffs.
