Revisiting the Real Life Scenario
Susan
Let’s return to the scenario involving Susan. There is a rather inevitable quality to her story that plays itself out over and over again across Canada. If we use a pet analogy, it is like that small mouse running all day in the wheel in its cage. The fact that she was released from jail with nothing, to a community that she was unfamiliar with, and with no connections to family or social support – sets her up to fail and inevitably be re-arrested. It is hard to know the impact of the social profiling that she experienced with the police outside her residence on a continuous basis asking her what she was doing. Can you imagine if every time you left your house this happened to you?
We need to ask ourselves:
- What comes to mind when you think of Susan and the challenges she has encountered? How does her situation make you feel?
- The housing that she ended up in fits in with the Canadian definition of being homeless. To et al. (2016) suggest that being incarcerated decreases the likelihood of being housed. How do you think her incarceration influenced her ability to find adequate housing? How do you think her experiences with inadequate housing impacted her success in transitioning from incarceration?
- How do you think Susan’s sense of social isolation would have been impacted if she was able to return to her home community? How might her situation have been different if she ended up part of an urban homeless community rather than on her own in a rural area?
- Dr. Nichols and Dr. O’Grady talked about the importance of discharge planning. Keeping in mind the social determinants of health, what might institutional discharge planning have involved for Susan?
