The Perils of Outreach Work

Abstract

As the doors of mental institutions closed behind the thousands of patients who once roamed their corridors, the streets of urban centers around the country became open-air wards for unmedicated and untreated mentally ill people who numbered among the many homeless and destitute in the city streets. This product of failed social and political policies required the development and implementation of new intervention strategies for workers who provided the population of homeless mentally ill clients with sorely needed treatment and support services. This worker became known as the “outreach worker.”

Outreach

In this hollow sphere of never-ending night We work our way through paths into their homes; Quietly we sneak, most coercive in our sight To heal the sick, to damn their sorrows some. Who gives Us leave? Who grants us ministry To mark the air with words of hope and faith? What stranger, wrangling in his artistry, Should take us to his home on rocks of slate? We cannot but deceive with truths so sweet They touch as lies; We fool them all. We pray that at our end we one day meet That stranger lying hollow to our call.

And yet in all the fooling, fool and fair, We may grow closer, willing that we dare.

—Julian Ball