Running To Stand Still

Watch "Elbow - Running To Stand Still" on YouTube

I dedicate this song to my brother. I know that this song is about heroin abuse, but when I listen to this song what I get out of it is the desperation of being trapped in an inescapable cycle. My brother as I have mentioned in earlier blogs is that person. My brother has a serious issue, schizophrenia, and he is in absolute denial of it and as a result he is trapped in a cycle of falling in and out of the Missouri mental healthcare system and falling in and out of his own life. I have great fears for my brother because where ever it is that he is going, where ever it is that his paranoid delusions take him I cannot see as being someplace good. I am not a fatalist, but unless my brother can somehow come to terms with his illness, I don't see his future as being bright. When I lived in San Diego and Phoenix often I came across a lost soul like my brother, someone mentally ill who's family may have forgotten, or given up on, or turned away.

" Despite the disproportionate number of mentally ill people among the homeless population, the
growth in homelessness is not attributable to the release of seriously mentally ill people from
institutions. Most patients were released from mental hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s, yet vast
increases in homelessness did not occur until the 1980s, when incomes and housing options for
those living on the margins began to diminish rapidly (see "Why Are People Homeless?," NCH
Fact Sheet #1). However, a new wave of deinstitutionalization and the denial of services or
premature and unplanned discharge brought about by managed care arrangements may be
contributing to the continued presence of seriously mentally ill persons within the homeless
population."

-NCH Fact Sheet #5

If my brothers SSI holds out during these politically unstable times, then he has a fighting chance, but without treatment, without the ability to become employed, I fear that my brothers future may be the same as the people I met wondering the street of the West Coast towns I've lived and visited. And my brother has some violent tendencies, so God only knows what trouble that may land him. I am trying to be optimistic, but it would be a lie if I said that I was anything but terrified for my brothers well being.