Great media story about ICHP
We are delighted that the MIssion Australia Inner City Housing Project got this fantastic story in today’s Telegraph. It highlights the incredible difference they are making for their clients - formerly homeless people with mental issues. Did you know it costs $900 a night to keep a mentally ill patient in a hospital bed - and just $35 a night to house someone properly in an ICHP house? Plus they get help, support and friendship every day from the ICHP counsellors, helping them to get their lives back to normal.
Read about it here……..
Better life in a house of hope
- From:The Daily Telegraph
- February 17, 2010
The lucky ones … Tim and Oliver on the front porch of their Surry Hills terrace / Pic: Justin lloyd Source: The Daily Telegraph
IT is a double-storey terrace, like many others on inner city streets. It looks like any share house occupied by three men. Yet what the facade doesn’t reveal are the hardships of these men who only months ago yearned to have four walls and a roof - a place to call home.
This is a house full of hope, spirit and mateship. There is nothing fancy, just the bare minimum - like the men who live there. How they came to be in the house is a stroke of luck.
All were suffering from mental illness, desperate and in serious danger of hurting themselves or others.
They had been living on the streets, sleeping on mates’ couches until they had worn their welcome out.
In a mental psychosis, each landed at St Vincent’s Hospital emergency department where, instead of turning them away to join the vicious cycle of crisis accommodation, hospital psych wards and homelessness, they were referred to a housing program.
Run by Mission Australia, The Inner City Housing Program has six properties around the city.
There are 27,000 homeless in NSW. But the program can only help 27 a year.
Oliver is one of the lucky ones. A year ago, the 38-year-old was calling the streets of Woolloomooloo home.
Suffering a mental illness and with drug and alcohol addictions, Oliver had nowhere to turn.
“I had been living down at Woolloomooloo with about 60 others and it was great, especially in summer,” he said. “Then one day I looked in the mirror. I hadn’t shaved for six months. My face was affected by the drugs and I thought ‘Wow, you have to do something about this’.”
In his Surry Hills terrace, shaven, clothed and owning an X-Box, Oliver credits the program for saving his life.
While at the house, he has weekly counselling and has been placed on medication. A life skills coach visits the men to teach cooking, shopping and how to fill out forms.
Raised in a wealthy family, Oliver had a privileged life growing up in Balmain.
The divorce of his parents and the death of his mother set him on the path of drugs and alcohol.
He is unlike his flatmate Tim, who at 41 found himself homeless.
Born in the UK and university-educated, Tim moved to Sydney after falling in love with an Australian woman 10 years ago.
But the relationship disintegrated and for Tim, who had always suffered depression and anxiety, the situation became life or death. With no friends or family to lean on, he found himself at St Vincent’s begging for help.
Neither own too much but the house comes with sheets, towels and utensils for a small fee.
Since they moved in, Tim has found part-time work and Oliver has taken up playing the guitar again and goes busking, earning extra cash.
In time, both hope to move out and live with other people, find full-time work and start afresh.