Homelessness, mental health, and cold Toronto winters

If you haven’t yet seen this truly sad story, which was reported last week in the Star, then I’m sorry in a way to be the one to share it with you. But it’s an important thing to share, because this sort of thing does happen on our streets during harsh winters, and it can be prevented.

Not easily, necessarily, but there are certainly compassionate steps we can all take. In the short term, the city’s website does include a section on shelter, support and housing administration, previously mentioned here and here. It doesn’t look like it’s been updated since the holidays, but it does contain a wealth of useful information.

But of course, the main issues in this particular case were issues of dementia and mental health. These aren’t easy issues to manage, but it’s vital that we find more effective ways to do so. The more you read the news – and the more ways in which mental health issues are shown to impact their victims, their loved ones, and society in general – the more obviously pressing the need to take action becomes.

But what are we supposed to do? Well, that’s as good a place to start as any, isn’t it?

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