28-year-old Matthew Cole Allen was homeless for around 4.5 years before finding solace in mental health care.

Allen, who has borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, said his path to recovery began when he was taken in by Transition House, a Norman organization that provides temporary housing and community outreach programs for homeless clients with mental health needs.

Now, Allen can be found in the kitchen of Food and Shelter, where he socializes and serves dishes for his fellow patrons of the shelter. Without help, Allen said he wouldn’t have survived.

“There are people that would never get treatment if they never had the opportunity to sober up. I wouldn’t be sober without my medication either. I was addicted to heroin and meth — I would not be alive,” Allen said.

Transition House and services like it face growing uncertainty as a $21.5 million funding gap looms over the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services.

Without a clear solution from the Oklahoma Legislature, the department’s only option may be to cut outpatient services across the state. Cuts would have an especially dire impact on Norman’s homeless.

This has meant many sleepless nights for Transition House executive director Bonnie Peruttzi.

Transition House receives 65 percent of its funding from the department. If that went away, it could be at risk of shutting down as the Legislature struggles to find a solution, Peruttzi said.

Across the state, 189,000 patients could lose care, and the effects for homeless people could be devastating. The executive director of Norman Food and Shelter, April Heiple, said nearly all of the people the shelter helps off the streets need mental health care.

Mental health treatment services provide homeless people the opportunity to recover and become a part of the community again, said Teresa Collado, executive director of the Virtue Center. Without that chance to start over, Collado said she fears the worst for Norman’s homeless population.

“Without substance abuse treatment, a homeless client isn’t going to have an opportunity to find a home, find work and get healthy again, so I would predict that those folks would die,” Collado said.

“The need is so great now, I can’t even imagine if more people become homeless.”

— Teresa Collado, executive director of the Virtue Center

32-year-old Alisha Chase finds shelter among several others in the warming station at Food and Shelter when the temperature gets too cold. Chase receives a monthly supply of medication from the shelter’s mental health office for post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

“I hear and see things if I don’t get my meds — I can’t tell reality from fantasy,” Chase said. “When I’m off my meds, I don’t know how this place deals with me, but they deal with me … If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to afford any meds.”

During her two years on the streets, Chase said she self-medicated with meth, alcohol and marijuana.

“It’s hard finding your footing, especially when you have no education, two felonies and mental health problems,” Chase said. “I probably wouldn’t have the felonies if I would’ve been on mental health meds back then, because we all self-medicate.”

Lt. Cary Bryant, Norman Police Department community outreach coordinator, works with Norman’s homeless on a regular basis and said the only way homeless mental health care clients will be able to avoid consequences like declining health or death is through services that are already too full to properly accommodate them.

“If they don’t continue to receive treatment, then they are going to decompensate, they’re going to get worse, and the only way they’re going to get treatment is with the inpatient services that are already overloaded,” Bryant said.

Heiple said many people who live in homes on the brink of poverty and who are dealing with mental health and substance abuse issues may also face a decline in physical health, possibly sending them into homelessness. This could increase homelessness in general and further hinder their ability to accommodate them, Heiple said.

“Our efforts to end homelessness and take every person off the streets is really dependent on their ability to access those services, and without them, there is just no way that we can either end homelessness or even stop it from getting greater or growing,” Heiple said.

Collado said the Virtue Center partners with Food and Shelter to help provide services for its homeless clients. However, Food and Shelter has already reached such a high capacity of residents that it cannot add any more to its waiting list, Heiple said.

“The need is so great now, I can’t even imagine if more people become homeless. The services aren’t available now, and so if the homelessness increases, that’s really going to have an impact on our community,” Collado said.

With a trend in funding gaps for mental health services in Oklahoma, Collado said she cannot grasp how the state allowed itself to sink to this level.  

“Mental health services have always been underfunded — we’ve experienced cuts every year in the last 10 years, and Oklahoma ranks in one of the bottom five in terms of mental health,” Collado said. “I’m not sure what needs to happen other than more people dying, more families being torn apart. It’s really a situation that I don’t understand.”

Both Collado and Heiple said their passion for their work comes from personal experience, seeing their loved ones struggle with mental illness and sometimes homelessness. Heiple said she hopes those in the legislature take action to help the homeless population.

“I really believe that we have got to, as a people, begin investing in people again. We have turned our back on people so often and so many times — we can’t toss away people anymore,” Heiple said. “Whether we agree with them or not, they are humans who deserve the love and care that all of us would want for ourselves.”

Without places like Transition House and Food and Shelter to provide help to homeless people, Allen said he may have never been able to recover — that’s a problem that many could face if mental health services are cut.

“This program was instrumental in me getting off the street and getting into my own place, which I am now at here at Food and Shelter,” Allen said.