“It is difficult to get homeless people to visit mental health clinics or stick to a regimen of medication,” Dr. Shayan Rab, a psychiatrist in Los Angeles who works with the county’s HOME (Homeless Outreach and Mobile Engagement) team told CBS News reporters Euan McKirdy and Mark Strassman. To solve that problem, Dr. Rab and the other mental health professionals who comprise the HOME team “bring their compassion and expertise to the streets, where they form bonds and build trust with [homeless] patients… many [of whom] are experiencing some kind of mental illness, which can be intensified by the stress of not having a home.” The “team’s work is holistic—along with diagnosing and treating mental illness, they work tirelessly to find people housing—permanent if possible, temporary if not— in an effort to break a cycle of deprivation, hopelessness and oftentimes, violence…”
- A Home Team Case Study:
“Mike spent the last 20 years living on Los Angeles’ streets. He was a loner, surviving mostly on a daily morning burrito – a substantial meal, he said, that would keep the hunger pangs away for the rest of the day… but with the HOME team’s help, he started taking a combination of medications that kept him grounded and clear-eyed, more so than he had been in two decades. After a course of treatment, administered when the HOME team would show up at his tent, the team found him a room in an L.A. care facility. He has now been living there for almost a year…”
Related: For The Los Angeles Times, Doug Smith profiles Dr. Rab, “L.A’.s first street psychiatrist making sidewalk rounds [and] transforming homeless lives.”