People with serious mental illness can’t find landlords who will rent to them or employers who will give them steady jobs. A person with serious mental illness is ten times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized. Jails and prisons have become the nation’s de facto mental health hospital system. The Cook County jail, where Danny spent four months, is now one of the three largest mental health facilities in the country. More than a quarter of the nation’s 559,000 homeless have a serious mental illness. Their average life span is ten to twenty years shorter than the general population.
