DatelineCarolinaColumbia woman works to stabilize mentally ill homeless

Columbia woman works to stabilize severely mentally ill homeless

By Gwendolyn Weiler
Edited by Lake Morris

Candice Morgan sits with a schizophrenic homeless woman known only as Miss Annie outside the Columbia Museum of Art as a warm, dead-animal smell pulses from an abscess filled with maggots and flies on Annie's leg.

Unfazed, Morgan angles toward Annie, leaning in like she's visiting an old friend, and urges Annie to come with her to the hospital to have the leg cleaned. Annie finally agrees – if Morgan, the homeless outreach coordinator for the Columbia Area Mental Health Center, will feed her.

Columbia streets serve as Morgan's office space, and her break room is the tent city behind the Elmwood Cemetery. She is in the field by 9 a.m. five days a week, searching for severely mentally ill homeless people who need help.

It's more than a job. It's a passion.

"I don't measure success in numbers. I measure it more on just did I make a difference in one or two people?" Morgan says.

Morgan, 46, said she returned to school to become a social worker after working seven years as a New York City chef. She works closely with nonprofit organizations that help the recovering homeless and mentally ill by giving them resources for stability.

"We do whatever it takes to make them a productive member of the community, living full and meaningful lives," says Liz Green, nurse manager of the Mental Illness Recovery Center, which provides counseling, housing and somewhere to go during the day besides the streets.

At least 1,006 homeless people are in Richland and Lexington counties, according to the 2009 South Carolina Homeless Count released by the South Carolina Council on Homelessness. Of those, 121, or 12 percent, said they were mentally ill, but there are probably more, since someone must volunteer the information, says Donny Supplee, chairman of the South Carolina Homeless Coalition, which does the biennial count for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban development.

It is probably closer to 60 percent, says Bill Lindsey, executive director of the South Carolina chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But not everyone wants to be helped, and not everyone wants to be found.

It's taken Annie two years of contact with Morgan to finally take her first steps toward recovery. Since getting her leg cleaned, she has gone to the Recovery Center to wash some clothes and take a bath – maybe the first one in years, Morgan says.

People with severe mental illness are sometimes so paranoid they won't even make eye contact, Morgan says. She uses what she calls "passive intrusion" to get through to them.

"If I don't insist on talking or making eye contact, but every single day let them see my face, I become part of their life," Morgan says. For several days, she'll walk by or drop something in front of them so they notice her when she picks it up.

"Then, when I do try to make contact, it's almost like they know me. I'm not a stranger," Morgan says.

Betty Kavanaugh, who worked with Morgan at the Baltimore-based Healthcare for the Homeless over 10 years ago, remembers Morgan as creative and having "good ideas about working with people."

"You come to an impasse and have to ask, ‘What's another way of coming at this?'" Kavanaugh says. "She was good with that."

Morgan says she often finds mentally ill homeless people who are disoriented, with no food, no money and no place to go.

"Then you talk to them and realize for their entire life, they lived at home, and in the last three or four years, the last person taking care of them died and now there's nobody," Morgan says. "They lose their home, and they lose their mind – in a big way."

Her first goal is to get them to the mental health emergency room at Palmetto Health-Richland.

Her first line of offense is to ask them to go. She drives them in her state car – a white sedan with manual locks and splitting seats – and stops at a drive-through on the way to feed them.

Or there's plan B: Blue lights and a detention order.

If someone who doesn't want to go is a danger to himself, herself or others, Morgan goes through Probate Court, and a police officer brings the person in.

That's just step one on the long road to recovery.

The goal is to stabilize the person, both mentally and physically, Morgan says. She stays in constant contact to make sure that people get to doctor's appointments, and she might even dip into her state-appropriated emergency funds to make sure they have a roof over their head.

"I'm like that parent or that spouse that shows up and goes, ‘OK, what do we need to do to get her better?' " Morgan says.

John Brown, director of crisis and forensic services at the area's mental health center, has no regrets in hiring Morgan in 2008.

"She has a big heart," Brown says. "Some people go the extra mile some of the time; she goes all of the time."

But sometimes, it's just a dead-end.

"You might see someone for three months solid, then they disappear," Morgan says. "You end up a lot of days with nothing changing; nobody gets any better."

"But then," she says, "you keep in mind, well today might be the day."