Dear Future President,

According to the Harvard Mental Health Letter, there are ¨about 6000,000 people that are homeless on any given night, and 2 million at some time in any given year¨. You were probably thinking that I was talking about the overall amount of homeless, but this statistic is actually for the mentally ill that are homeless. In this day and age we should have mental facilities for the safety of themselves and others. Because of the amount of mentally ill that are homeless, we should have more mental facilities for the caring of them.

Some of our spending should be going to the severe mentally ill to put them all in care facilities. Personally, I’ve known people who had severe cases of mental illnesses, but they had help from their friends and family. They suffered a lot and maybe they would still be here if they had help from a professional. But they fought out for less than a year and couldn't do it, so think about the severe mentally ill that are homeless with no one to care for them. They need a lot more help. In the Harvard Mental Health Letter it states that ¨after adjustment for inflation, states today spend 30% less on mental health care than they did in 1955¨. 30 percent less may not seem like a lot, but that percent probably are the people who have nothing. The spending needs to go back to how it was to help these people who can help it. Overall, we should start balancing out our money for these people who are helpless and need professional help.

When thereś a drop in resources from a mental institution, there should be checks to help with the people. From the 60’s, mental institutions started dropping non-violent patients from their care. For the ones that don’t have other people to help take care of themselves, they just have to live out on the streets with no more checkups. According to the National review “Only 800 of the 2000 centers placed around the notion were built.” Once a lot of people were released, they meant to make about 2000 institutions but ended up having less than half needed. So not only do less than half of them get help, the rest don’t have checkups on their health. Therefore, with the amount of people that didn’t get anything, there should be checkups for them after release date.

There needs to be more studies on why some of the mentally ill were homeless for at least one night in the previous year. For anyone who's been in a big city, or a more run-down city, I would guess that most of us have seen a mentally ill homeless person. They could have been homeless for years now, or maybe just a few days. So I want to know more information on that, such as how they got in that position. “A survey of more than 10,000 patients treated for serious mental illnesses in San Diego County found that 15% had been homeless during the previous year¨. If 1500 people were homeless for at least one night in the previous year in one county, imaging how many people in the US alone have been homeless for at least one night in the past year. So to end, there should at least be more studies to understand how these people got in those positions.

In conclusion, since there is such a high amount of mentally ill homeless people, the state should supply more mental institutions for them. Not only should there be more buildings, there should be surveys and money going towards them too. There should also be strict regulations providing the information of how many mentally ill homeless people there are per month and checkups after they get released from one of the institutions.