Last week on the subway, I saw a man crouch down over an empty seat, proceeding to urinate — and possibly defecate. His behavior and ostensible intoxication were so extreme that it is possible that he mistook the subway seat for a toilet seat. It was a first for me. It gave me pause to consider how we got here, and what we can do to get out of here.
I am a psychologist who has amassed related experience on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, the most relevant of which was completed in the late 1990s in New York and then again in the late 2010s in Toronto. The former was completed at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, where I worked intensively with “street people,” on a unit dedicated to mentally ill chemical abusers. The latter was completed at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where I worked intensively with a similar population of adolescents and young adults.
