In America, it’s easier to get jail time than a roof over your head if you’re living with severe mental illness. Despite decades of advocacy and growing awareness, the Federal government continues to underfund long-term housing solutions for people who need it most. Programs like HUD’s Section 811 and Continuum of Care grants exist, but they’re limited, overburdened, and tangled in red tape. As a result, thousands are left waiting—often homeless, hospitalized, or cycling through institutions—because the system is designed to react to crises, not prevent them. Even when support is available, it rarely covers what truly keeps people stable. Medicaid, for example, might fund therapy or case management, but it won’t pay a dime toward rent or a permanent place to live. Without housing, these services are like giving someone a lifejacket with no water—it looks helpful, but it doesn’t meet the need. The separation of housing and mental health services in policy creates a deadly gap: people qualify for treatment but have nowhere to heal.
This isn’t a funding issue—it’s a priority issue. The burden of filling these gaps has fallen on nonprofits, overwhelmed shelters, and families stretched to their limits. If we’re serious about mental health in this country, housing must be part of the treatment plan—not an afterthought. Until then, the cycle of crisis will continue, and people with severe mental illness will remain invisible to the systems meant to protect them.
So what’s supposed to happen to someone with schizophrenia who doesn’t come from money? Where do they go after a hospitalization, or when their symptoms make it impossible to hold a job or maintain a lease? The hard truth is—unless they have access to rare, subsidized housing programs or an exceptional case manager advocating on their behalf—they’re often discharged to the streets, shelters, or overcrowded board-and-care homes with little oversight. These environments aren’t therapeutic; they’re survival-based, chaotic, and often unsafe.
The current public system treats housing as a reward for stability, rather than the foundation for it. But stability doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Without safe, supported housing, medication adherence drops. Psychosis escalates. Emergency room visits, arrests, and hospitalizations rise.The cycle continues—not because someone is unwilling to get better, but because the system never gave them a real chance. For people without private wealth, there’s no fallback plan, no soft landing, and no room for error.
Families often try to fill the gap, but many are overwhelmed or unequipped to manage the intensity of a chronic, severe mental illness. Others are estranged, burned out, or have passed away. Without family support or financial resources, people with schizophrenia are left to navigate one of the most complex and unforgiving public systems on their own—often while experiencing delusions, paranoia, or disorganized thinking. It’s not just unjust. It’s inhumane.
Private wealth, in contrast, can buy access to residential treatment centers, structured housing, and dedicated care teams. It can extend a safety net that most Americans don’t have. This divide creates two mental health systems—one for the privileged, and one for everyone else. And in the “everyone else” category, many people are doing everything they can just to survive another day in a system that wasn’t built with them in mind.
The question isn’t whether people with schizophrenia deserve housing. Brace for impact—it’s whether we, as a society, believe they deserve to live. Because housing is life support for someone with a serious mental illness—and when it’s unavailable, what happens next is entirely predictable. The homelessness, the jail time, the crisis cycles—they’re not failures of the individual. They’re the result of a system that punishes illness and privatizes stability.
I didn’t set out to work in mental health housing. I changed careers overnight after our dad was killed in a car accident and I became my older brother’s legal guardian. He lives with schizophrenia and learning delays, and suddenly it was my job to figure out where he would go—not just for a few months, but for life. I looked everywhere, and what I found was devastating. Unless you could afford $30,000 a month, there were no safe, stable, or humane options. There was no model that offered community, clinical support, and a sense of home. So I built one.
That’s how Sullivan House was born. I created it because I had to—because my brother deserved better, and so do the thousands of others like him who are quietly slipping through the cracks. This work started as a personal mission, but it’s now a public one. We all have skin in this game.
Schizophrenia has existed as long as human beings have. So why is it that in 2025, we’re still this lost—this underprepared, this confused—about how to create safe, stable, and even joyful places for people with schizophrenia to live?