Many of Portland’s least fortunate live in tents pitched on sidewalks or in aging campers parked in small convoys behind grocery stores.
High housing costs and financial adversity are the primary root causes behind the burgeoning population on the streets; only about one in three people who are homeless in Portland report having a mental illness or a substance use disorder, or both.
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This story comes from NPR’s health reporting partnership with KQED, OPB and Kaiser Health News (KHN).
But the combination of homelessness with substance use or untreated mental illnesses has led to a lot of very public tragedies.
People with schizophrenia, for example, have died of hypothermia on the city’s streets. Residents have given birth out in the open, to premature infants who did not survive. Methamphetamine, cheaper and more harmful than it used to be, is creating a heightened risk of overdose and psychosis.
Mental illness can be part of the story of how a person ends up homeless — or part of the price of survival on the streets, where sleep and safety are scarce. Unsheltered residents in Portland die thirty years earlier than the average American, according to county data.
These grim realities have increased pressure on politicians to do something.
In Oregon, some politicians, including Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, have proposed changing civil commitment law, so doctors have more leeway in compelling treatment for patients who are too sick to know they need care.
Without such changes, they argue, people…
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