A former Salt Lake City Library Administrator speaks out on the growing problem of the mentally ill and chronically homeless taking day time refuge in America’s public libraries. As someone who lives in a very rural county and rarely see homelessness I found this article heart-wrenching. It’s a long read but it describes many of the problems first hand and actually offers practical solutions.
It’s also a condemnation of how we as a society cast off our mentally ill.
Ophelia is not so far off after all — in a sense she is dead and has been for some time. Hers is a kind of social death from shunning. She is neglected, avoided, ignored, denied, overlooked, feared, detested, pitied, and dismissed. She exists alone in a kind of social purgatory. She waits in the library, day after day, gazing at us through multiple lenses and mumbling to her invisible friends. She does not expect to be rescued or redeemed. She is, as she says, “used to it.”
She is our shame. What do you think about a culture that abandons suffering people and expects them to fend for themselves on the street, then criminalizes them for expressing the symptoms of illnesses they cannot control? We pay lip service to this tragedy — then look away fast. As a library administrator, I hear the public express annoyance more often than not: “What are they doing in here?” “Can’t you control them?” Annoyance is the cousin of arrogance, not shame.
We can more than control them; we can help them.
Technorati Tags: libraries homeless, mentally ill homeless, chronically homeless
0 Responses to “Urban Libraries: America’s Daytime Homeless Shelters”