This article demonstrates how stressors can build upon each other:
At any given time, there may be a few hundred homeless people in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, huddling under the overpasses from the persistent Washington rain. It’s a familiar place for Geraldine, who has spent the past 20 years caring for her 38-year-old son, who is mentally ill.
When her son is not in prison or in hospital, Geraldine, 64, makes daily visits to a three-block area to bring him food, drink and warm clothing. She knows the color of his sleeping bag, and seeks it out among the dozens of others in between the shopping carts and trash bags. Sometimes he rejects her help. Other times, he gives her gifts to other people on the street.
Often, her son has lost more weight, and his hair is more unkempt. His eyes look distant and strained.
These days, however, instead of going to Pioneer Square, Geraldine makes a weekly trip to a psychiatric hospital, where her son is being treated for schizophrenia.
It’s the longest Geraldine’s son has been stably housed since his initial diagnosis nearly 20 years ago, but she’s afraid he will end up back on the streets, in prison, or dead – because of the lack of safe, long-term housing available to people with severe mental illness.
"It's all-consuming. I think about it all the time, even when I'm doing things I enjoy,” Geraldine told the Guardian. “Then I think about him and how he is living.”
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