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Leaving the room to scream
Fullerton, Andrew
Fullerton, Andrew
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I used to know a man who lived in a boarding home in a neighbourhood of Toronto. Real estate leaflets plug certain houses by saying they’re set in a ‘preferred location’, which is ad-speak for ‘rich people live here’. Not this house: its neighbourhood is scruffy and densely packed, a way-station gathering immigrants who anticipate a new life, and a terminus for defeated souls who await the old life’s end. Like the boarding house that housed him, this man was tattered, tired and dejected; on a downward drift from higher, happier days. I visit that house still in the company of a chaplain who has made it his work to befriend people clinging near the bottom of society’s ladder, living isolated lives in houses like these. Some have lived on and off the street for years. A few have fallen from higher rungs of respectability. Jobs, houses, money, families, friends and self-esteem have been lost from their lives like coins flung from a pocket on a downhill fall. Some have been in prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Almost all take drugs prescribed for this or that brand of mental illness. Wretched side effects are the price they pay for fragile relief from psychotic symptoms.
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2007-11
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With permission of the license/copyright holder