Featuring Amy Turk, LCSW, Chief Executive Officer of the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), the only organization in Los Angeles focused exclusively on serving and empowering women experiencing homelessness.
What’s the one common denominator among women experiencing homelessness? Is homelessness a moral failing, or a consequence of complex trauma? Does substance abuse cause homelessness, or is it a coping mechanism? Amy Turk, a social worker and chief executive officer of the Downtown Women’s Center, and host Brenda Gazzar discuss how when it comes to our health care, it’s always cheaper to do the right thing.
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Complex Trauma & Mental Illness on Skid Row
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Opening MUSIC – “Talk Back” 10 seconds, fade down
Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today, we’ll talk about homelessness, mental health and substance abuse on L.A.’s Skid Row.
Amy Turk is the chief executive officer of the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), the only organization in Los Angeles focused exclusively on serving and empowering women experiencing homelessness. She’s held leadership positions in the field of social work and homeless services since 2001.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Amy.
Turk: Thank you, Brenda.
Q: What about mental health issues? What are the trends that you’re noticing? And what’s most effective in dealing with these?
Turk: Among women especially experiencing homelessness, everyone’s path is unique, and their reasons for homelessness are unique. Yet if there’s any one common denominator, it’s the experience of trauma. Again, whether that’s from growing up in a home environment that was traumatic, or adult relationships or other life threatening circumstances that people have either lived through or perceived as life threatening. And untreated. trauma can really impact people’s abilities to function, right?
And trauma can be layered on top of trauma, on top of trauma, on top of trauma, and then suddenly, we call that complex trauma. And so you might see someone who is quick to yell or quick to literally run away or sort of pull back or, you know, not engage. And that can be misdiagnosed. You could start to hear service providers say like, ‘oh, that person is not compliant. Oh, that person has missed three doctor’s appointments. They’re no longer allowed to come here anymore’
But really they’re dealing with trauma and with normal, what really are like a normal reaction based on literally how their brain composition has changed because of trauma, so we know so much more about trauma and there’s so much more to learn, too.
So you know, more commonly people are more commonly diagnosed with PTSD, or depression or in some cases psychotic symptoms resulting from schizophrenia.
So, it’s a long-winded way of saying I think that the field of mental health needs to turn more of its attention to understanding trauma and understanding the behaviors that are a normal reaction to a trauma but that might show up in environments where you don’t see any danger around and it might get misperceived.
Q: Right. So trauma informed care, I think that is what it’s called. Is that right?
Turk: Yeah, that’s a practice that we, it’s kind of our overarching practice that really is a philosophy of seeing people through the lens of not “what’s wrong with you,” but “what happened to you?” And not like we’re literally going up to people and saying what happened to you?
But that we can automatically assume that something traumatic has happened to someone. And that’s why folks are having some challenges that might be very present in the moment.
Q: Right, right. Substance abuse. Do you want to say anything about substance abuse?
Turk: I think as it relates to substance abuse, you could imagine that the experience of homelessness is so awful. And how else would people cope through even one night on the sidewalk without potentially turning to substances? Not all do but certainly we see it as a way to just cope with awful circumstances and of course, it just can lead to a spiraling of additional problems related to more health complications or addictions but more as a means to cope.
Q: Do you think, Amy, that a universal, unified health care system that included coverage for mental health, behavioral health, substance abuse would be a benefit to the homeless? And if so, why?
Turk: I do think universal health coverage would be a benefit to everyone. Anything that makes it easier to help with any health conditions but also prevent health conditions. There’s really no reason that the people that we’re working with should have hypertension, or diabetes, or even obesity because of, you know, the lack of affordability of healthy food. There’s no reason for these things really.
And it’s always – I keep coming back to this – but it’s always cheaper to do the right thing, to provide healthy food or to provide health care, it ultimately really is cheaper to provide those systems than to wait until things get so bad that the only intervention is a very expensive intervention.
Q: Thank you, Amy.
Find more Code WACK! episodes at ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen to Code WACK! at heal-ca.org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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