OLLI101542 - Confronting the Triple Epidemic: Homelessness, Mentally Ill, and Addicted in America (ONLINE VIA ZOOM)

Course Description

CONFRONTING THE TRIPLE EPIDEMIC: HOMELESS, MENTALLY ILL AND DRUG ADDICTED IN AMERICA                                                  

Instructor: Jay Pomerantz

Day of Week: Wednesday

Dates: Jan 31 – Mar 27 (8 sessions)

No Class: Mar 6

Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM

Location: Online via Zoom

In the United States between 2.5 and 3.5 million individuals experience homelessness in some form over the course of a single year. Many of the more chronically homeless are mentally ill and/or suffer from alcohol and drug abuse. Increasingly, the police, emergency room staff, courts, jails, and prisons are becoming overwhelmed by this population. Let’s look at some ways to ameliorate and treat this epidemic. For starters, at least 90% of the time behavioral health crises can be appropriately dealt with without involving the police. A new national number (988) to contact local suicide prevention and crisis counselors trained in on-line support and referral for help is a better alternative than calling 911. Other initiatives include Assertive Community Teams (ACT), supportive housing, drop-in clinics,

specialized training for the police and emergency room staff, treatment within our jails, and recovery programs for addicts. What else might be helpful?

Maximum Online: 300

Instructor Bio:

Jay Pomerantz, MD, Yale University School of Medicine. Following an internship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, he served on the medical staff of the U.S. Peace Corps. He then completed a residency in psychiatry at Mass Mental Health Center in Boston. After that, he practiced outpatient psychiatry while continuing on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. He retired in 2015.

Notes

Why when I’m registering do I join the Wait List?
Several of our courses are in high demand. In order to accommodate our members who are not tech-savvy and have trouble registering online, we created a registration system in which there is no advantage to registering early, no disadvantage to registering later.

When registering, you join the Wait List for each course. Don’t be alarmed. This does not mean the course is full. After the registration period is over, we run a lottery on the courses, and it randomly determines who is admitted to each course and who is not. You typically will receive notification regarding which courses you are admitted to, about two weeks before the start of the semester. If a course accepts 150 or more students, you are very likely to get into it.