N4L 112: "Catching Homelessness" by Josephine Ensign

SUMMARY

Josephine Ensign shares her own story in Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net. Even though she’s a nurse trained to keep an emotional distance from her patients “to prevent being so overwhelmed that it cripples the provision of proper health care,” Ensign works tirelessly to treat and keep track of the homeless in the South during the beginning of the homelessness epidemic in the 1980s. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to even her close friends, the well-educated Christian wife and nurse Ensign becomes homeless herself, living on the edge under the noses of the privileged. Now, decades later, Ensign writes this medical memoir “to provide a framework for the empathy necessary to create positive change for people pushed to the margins.”

KEY POINTS

We need to learn to ask ourselves why people are homeless; most don’t choose that lifestyle. Many homeless keep pets (mostly dogs, sometimes cats; some even keep rats snakes, or even crickets) to provide protection and company. Foot problems almost universal among the homeless since they often have to walk places. Coupled with unsanitary conditions and inclement weather, socks and shoes wear out quickly and feet contract infections and get frostbite. Identifying and dealing with childhood trauma can help prevent mental illness and subsequent homelessness that can often follow. “Voluntary poverty” – choosing to live in spartan conditions similar to those of the homeless in an effort to better understand that demographic.

QUOTES FROM ENSIGN

“Homelessness is exhausting and soul-sucking…[It] is a type of deep illness, a term coined by sociologist Arthur Frank for an illness that leaves you feeling dislocated, an illness that casts a shadow over your life. That shadow never completely goes away.” “The business of nursing brings us into the messy swampland of human suffering, illness, and death.” “People do not want to have to depend on handouts, on the kindness of strangers.” “Sometimes I felt that I was literally and figuratively putting Band-Aids on the problem of homelessness, patching people up, and sending them back out into a life that was breaking them again. I was frustrated that I couldn’t do more to address the bigger issues that were causing homelessness.” “Charity care further fragments and separates us as members of society—sorts us into haves and have-nots, into worthy and unworthy citizens. Charity care perpetuates poverty.” “Our country’s healthcare safety net is built on the principles of poverty medicine.” How to help the homeless: “Respond with a smile and a kind word—even if it is ‘No—sorry’ when you are asked for a handout…There’s nothing worse than for a person to be ignored.”

BUY Catching Homelessness: A Nurse's Story of Falling Through the Safety Net

RECOMMENDATION

Check out the first seminal book about homelessness written by Nels Anderson who, as a boy, was taken in by a family.

BUY The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man

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