Homeless Outreach Team Gold Coast: Sliding doors moment that saved Donna Beahan’s life
A Gold Coast woman says she’d be dead if it wasn’t for an unexpected encounter. READ HER REMARKABLE STORY
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Donna Beahan is a strong, proud woman. She has endured a lot and seen a lot. But at this moment, she can’t hold back the tears.
Emotion wrung from years of struggle, fear and violence comes pouring forth.
She has long since made her escape. She is safe, she has remade her life.
She did so after a sliding-doors moment. But what if it never happened.
“I’d be dead,” she sobs. “Dead. I would have killed myself.”
ON STREETS IN A STRANGE TOWN
Fifteen years ago Donna, and her then 14-year-old daughter, were on the streets
“I’d come from domestic violence and he’d committed suicide,” Donna says. “Messy is the word.
“So I left town and ended up on the Gold Coast with my daughter.”
Donna says she was depressed, even suicidal, and suffered from bipolar.
She had lost all hope.
But then something remarkable happened. Donna was given a place in a shelter, where she knew members of a Queensland Health team that few people know exists.
“It was Blair Athol, which is crisis accommodation,” she says. “I was lucky enough that the lady who worked there got me in there. I was safe.
“I didn’t realise at the time, there was a big kerfuffle going on because Blair Athol was for men, but Liz Fritz, she got me in there and I was safe.
“Then she said to me there’s a team called the HOT team. And I was like ‘OK, I’ll see what they can do’.
“Because I was off tap at the time, I wasn’t good.
“So they turned up and I just sat and talked and it was one word. It was ‘hope’.”
ANGELS EMERGE
The Homelessness Health Outreach Team had just been set up. Social worker Rod Nathan was one of its first members. He still works for the service today.
They go out on the streets, providing assessments, care co-ordination and clinical interventions for homeless people who are experiencing mental illness.
Most importantly, they bring that one word, hope.
“I’ve been doing it for a while,” Rod says.
“You just walk up to them and start chatting. You don’t treat them like they’re homeless. You treat them like they’re just you and I sitting here for a chat.
“Then you start prying out the little bits and pieces.”
Rod offers help with basic needs to help break the ice.
“You have to go in with something,” he says. “You can’t go in and say, ‘we’re mental health’, because you get your head bitten off.
“So you go in with some sort of resources. I often have blankets, or clothes, or even dog food on the trucks. Swags and stuff like that. It’s good to have something to offer because underlying it, you’re going to see all of the effects of homelessness comes out as mental illness in the first instance.
“You’ve kind of got to offer them a little bit of bait.”
HOT TOPIC OF INCREASING PROBLEM
The HOT service has been running since 2006, but with about 120 clients a month, it’s never been busier. Fuelled by the rental crisis and increasing population, the number of homeless people on the streets of the Gold Coast has swelled.
Sometimes they even include children as young as 12.
“Recently there was a group of them living down in Cascade Gardens (in Broadbeach),” Rod says. “I’ve driven through Cascade Gardens early in the morning and they’re just waking up, you can see that they’ve created havoc and there’s a mess everywhere.
“But you just drive past and you say, ‘hey you guys, need blankets or anything’ and they say ‘yeah’, so you say ‘I’ll swing back tomorrow with some’ and take it from there.
“You’re getting them from as young as 12, and up to 18.”
Donna has seen them too. As a former homeless person herself, it upsets her.
“I saw them the other week and one of the girls was walking around sniffing glue. It just broke my heart.
“I went down to Broadbeach for lunch, came back and she was on her second tin. It’s so heartbreaking.”
BREAKING THE FALL
Most homeless people are on a spiral. A spiral that starts with trauma or health issues, leads them on to the streets, towards depression, drug and alcohol use, sometimes even suicide.
Kim Tanner is a consultant psychiatrist with the HOT team service. She says there is something else that adds to their problems.
“They often feel terribly judged,” Kim says. “They feel like everybody in the community is thinking so negatively and badly of them. You very frequently hear that they really want to isolate, so it makes it difficult for them to go out and get what they need, because they’re so feeling judged by the community around them.”
The sense of hopelessness can lead to broader problems.
“With mental health issues, half have mental health issues prior to becoming homeless but then often another half, actually, they develop their mental health issues as a consequence of being homeless,” Kim says. “You know, depression and PTSD.
“... We see people who are really desperate, tormented, so distressed.”
It leads to people wanting to hide from the world. It causes them to fail to seek the help they need. Which is why the HOT team goes out on the streets.
“We need to go out (and) see them,” Kim says. “They are quite marginalised. They won’t use conventional medical or mental health services and they need that sort of ongoing, regular input in relation to their mental health care, physical health care, social needs.”
FROM HOPELESS TO BEYOND HOPE
As one of the team’s first clients, and now one of its employees, Donna is in no doubt about the value of those interventions.
“I was hopeless. I was living in tents. I was suicidal, went through all that,” she says.
“They (the HOT team) just gave me hope and then they started encouraging me. They encouraged me to go back to work, that’s how I became a consumer companion.
They encouraged me to volunteer, I volunteered at the RSPCA, I loved that.
“It just was hope.
“It kept me off the streets.
“Then they encouraged me to put my name down for housing. I was blessed enough to get one of those, which I’ve now had for 15 years.”
YOU’LL HAVE THEM AT HELLO
There’s a cruel stereotype about homeless people. Drunk. Abusive. Violent. “Bums”.
People like Donna were never anything like that. Neither are most of the people on Gold Coast streets.
“I think a lot of people think that people that are homeless are violent,” Donna says. “It’s not that at all. They’re just people who are doing it tough.
“The last thing they want to do is be violent to you. They just want to be left alone.”
Christmas is a hard time for them. It reminds them what they don’t have. And what they miss most are not the material things like presents.
“It’s family and stuff like that,” Donna says. “You see it on the TV, people waking up with family and stuff, and a lot of people don’t have it.”
Rod says there are simple things we can all do to help. Things that don’t cost a cent.
“Just a simple hello is better than five dollars,” he says. “Just a simple hello, and a smile, and then the next day the same thing.
“It’s like a lot of the elderly on the Gold Coast, when they go and do their shopping, their eyes and their heads are always down. Just a simple hello to that person, you’re probably the only one who’s going to say hello to that person in that day, maybe in one week.
“The same principle applies to the homeless. You see somebody out there in the street and you get eye contact, just say ‘hi, how are you’, or ‘nice day isn’t it’. Just normal.
“People just walk by and they’re judged. It’s one of the reasons this HOT team was put together, because they didn’t have a voice. And the EDs, they were blocking up the EDs.
If you walk up to a person, it’s just a simple g’day (that makes a difference).”
HELPING HAND OF HUMANITY
Donna’s story is testament to the difference a little humanity, a little help can make.
Donna’s daughter, too, is doing well, working full-time and renting her own home.
“She’s got a great job”, Donna says. “She’s one of the loveliest women that you’ll ever meet.”
The pair could was able to enjoy a wonderful Christmas together and Donna says she is forever grateful.
Grateful that the HOT team pulled her back from the brink of suicide. That they helped her find medical care, work, and a roof over her head.
But most of all grateful that they gave her that most precious of gifts: Hope.
* If you need someone to talk to phone Lifeline on 13 11 14
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Originally published as Homeless Outreach Team Gold Coast: Sliding doors moment that saved Donna Beahan’s life
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