Navigating the Frontlines: A Glimpse into Homelessness, Missing Persons, and Complex PTSD with Eric Hofstein

Jerry: 0:15

Welcome to today's episode of Enduring the Badge Podcast. I'm host Jerry Dean Lund and if you haven't already done so, please take out your phone and hit that subscribe button. I don't want you to miss an upcoming episode. And hey, while your phone's out, please give us a rating and review. On whichever platform you listen to this podcast on, such as iTunes, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps this podcast grow and the reason why, when this gets positive ratings and reviews, those platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify show this to other people that never listened to this podcast before, and that allows our podcast to grow and make a more of an impact on other people's lives. So if you would do that, I would appreciate that from the bottom of my heart. My very special guest today is Eric Hofstein. Eric was a former law enforcement officer out of the Bay Area. He spent 27 years in that area. He worked a lot of calls that dealt with homeless, the addicts, the mentally ill, and Eric wanted to become a conduit of trying to connect people to resources and connect people to their loved ones, and he went the extra mile on calls. But that also comes with a price of seeing that and dealing with that, and Eric will tell the story about that as well. Eric also wrote a book called what Doesn't Kill you. We'll get into that and Eric will explain why he wrote it and what's in that book. And I want to jump into this episode with my very special guest Eric, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Eric: 1:41

I survived 27 years of law enforcement in California. Before that, I was an EMT. I worked in an emergency room at a main hospital in Santa Cruz Dominican Hospital and I decided, after trying both careers out, to switch to law enforcement. And I'm not sure how they do it in other states. I've heard the term auxiliary police, but in California, they have what's called reserve police officers and you're a volunteer. Some pay a little bit, some don't, depending on what your assignments are. But I started off as a volunteer, working on my own time in a gang city, Salinas, California. It's where the Norteneas got started. I don't know if you're familiar with the movie Blood in, blood Out in Western Familia, where they started with their battles against Lime. And eventually, the excitement got to me being outdoors growing up reading Joseph Wambow books, like The Choir Boys with their choir practice stories, and I got a bit too hard. I went into law enforcement, dropped medicine and moved around to a few different departments trying to find the right fit for my family. I'm in a mixed marriage. My wife is black, I'm white, and Jewish, and back then we had trouble finding a good place to raise our kids where we were comfortable, that we could afford. California market was out of control. When I left I went to San Jose, which was at that time the premier agency in the country to work for. They literally were hiring people from all over the world laterals and there were guys living in motor homes in the parking lot. One guy was flying back home on his days off because you couldn't find anything close. As a matter of fact, the closest affordable city was Salinas, a nice two hour commute so that you could basically wake up as a cop next to you drive by shootings at your neighbor's house. And my family, as I was telling you, went to Florida. Almost all of them are down there now. So I thought I'll try it out. Get a take home car. Affordable living Was there for three years. My wife and kids hated it, missed their family. They were California types. They just didn't fit into the southern Florida culture. I'll call it and settled into a sheriff's department Contra Costa in East Bay. It's a. Northern California is huge. One of the things I preface is think of Maine to Florida being split up into three states. Yeah, it's an eight hour drive from San Francisco to LA alone, so they're very different. We lived in Southern California. I hated it. Never even visited San Diego, my wife says anyone who is from California never visits down there. There's nothing to see. So we went up to the John Wood, john Muir, redwood areas up north. That's a beautiful scenery, the Wine Valley and Contra Costa had some affordable living. So we settled into there. Working for the sheriff's office did some jail time. You had to do your mandatory years. I think it was three minimum. I did five to make sure I wouldn't be rotated back. And I went through some stuff which I talk about in my book kind of changed my perspective. My mental health was kind of strained so I thought why not? I've got 20 something years in. I was 21 years at that point. Why not punch out and go to Bay Area Rapid Transit and police, which I grew up around in New York City, is very different. You don't go into homes, you're not doing traffic crashes and DUIs and scraping dead bodies out of hoarder homes and their pay was just phenomenal. It was just their perks. They were at the time. They had a lot of money and they even gave out bonuses, which was a private sector thing. You never saw a law enforcement. I was making six figures base pay To start with and then, because it was transportation under DOT Department of Transportation, any employee who works in overtime shift and then comes back for more overtime shifts gets paid double time. So yeah, making ungodly amounts of money. I thought, what? What can I lose? This is a win-win and I fell into the rabbit hole of homelessness, mental illness and addiction, which is what the book's about. There is an 8,000 homeless crammed into 49 square miles from all over the world coming to the Bay Area for specific reasons to live on, even just to live on the streets.

Jerry: 6:50

Yeah, let's. Let's talk a little bit about your book and why you wrote that.

Eric: 6:56

Okay, that's an easy one. I realized that there was an issue. Most police departments have specialized units to deal with issues such as if, in San Jose, we had downtown active bars and clubs, there was a traffic unit. They had officers who would stand out in the corner literally hand out citations for a gridlock to keep the traffic moving. You have gang units, you have narcotics units, even domestic violence. Well, San Francisco, the primary issue was mental illness and addiction, Homelessness on top of that. But you had people shooting up on staircases right in front of you. You had people die and left and right we had tremendous calls for service. Every shift you had multiple calls for service of what we call a 5150, somebody who's mentally unstable, into danger to themselves or others. Yet there was nothing to address it but San Francisco services, which spends $2 billion on one resource after another. That didn't seem to be doing a thing about putting a dent into the issue. It always ended up on our laps. In the end, I thought I have all this experience. I have over 20 years. I'm a trained investigator. They've trained me to investigate. Why not go out there and be a detective and really get to the root of the problem? Why are people homeless, why are they mentally ill and on the streets, why do they become addicts and how do you get them to stop becoming addicts? So I objectively addressed it and it just opened up from there this whole world, or underworld I guess you could say that I stepped into and I made a lot of connections. I think by the end I had been working with over 45 families, reconnecting them to their homeless loved ones, and they would send me pictures, tell me stories. You know you sit in line up in the morning and I'm turning on my work phone. I'm looking down at all these baby pictures and bar mitzvah pictures are popping up and please, if you see my loved one, can you send them? Show them these pictures, tell them dad passed away, Tell them. I started becoming a conduit between the families Because, if you think about it, when your child is homeless or parent, as with some of them, who do you call? You can do a missing persons report, but even then they have a right to be missing. They don't have to be found if they don't want to be. So there's no one to call and talk to. And there's other issues I learned, which was conditions like schizophrenia don't appear until your late 20s. Well, early 20s to late 20s. I think it's a little later for girls and is for boys. Yet when you turn 18, HIPAA kicks it. All of a sudden, the legal system says your child is not your child anymore. But now they're doing things that are strange, they're acting in a dangerous manner, they're paranoid, they're delusional, they're self-medicating. And these families all of a sudden? Really I don't get it. You was so brilliant and now all of a sudden he's living in his car smoking meth every day and won't talk to us. Who do we call? There was no one. So I became. I became that someone and I worked hard to build the bonds with the people I worked with to get them what they need to improve their condition. Some of them won, which I got to be careful. If I hesitated it's because I'm slowing down, not to say the names. Yeah, you can get, I don't want to violate the privacy, but one, for example, was a nuclear scientist, inspected nuclear reactors and he's living out of the trash. That's how, even though he had money, the woman in the book that I mentioned I think I called Misca, four letters in an Ivy League school worked for nonprofits. Her volunteer work, I think is what it was, pushed her over the edge and she became homeless. Paranoid delusions started blowing through her inheritance and I found the family doing a little bit of detective work and they were ecstatic. They didn't know she was alive. She was dead. She had a son who was in Japan studying for his PhD. They lost communication and I realized it's a horrible thing, going to sleep at night Not knowing is your mother, is your son alive right now? Are they dead? Are they suffering? What are they going through? And life on the streets is horrible, especially for the women, which is why I focused on them. Their levels of assault is 100%, as one girl put it. She told me 80% of them are pimped out, usually gorilla pimped. The shelters are unsafe. That woman, Misca. I tried to get her to a shelter. She said the last time I went to a shelter, some dude got naked and climbed into the shower with me. I'd rather live on the street than go to one of those places again. So I realized, OK, shelters are in the answer. Now what do I do? And as I talk about my book, I worked with this one girl. I don't remember if I gave her a pseudonym, but she wanted to get off the streets, came from her upper class community, had a horrible childhood, beautifully young girl, had everything ahead of her and fell into the opiate addiction. I finally found her a SRO, basically a navigation bed that would lead to single resident occupied housing, and it took a lot of work and she turned it down and I wrote about just what that's like. This is where you get the. Are we allowed to cross on here?

Jerry: 13:12

Yeah. You're good I was. I don't want to interrupt, I don't want to interrupt but. I had to fuck her attitude.

Eric: 13:21

You don't want. You want me to do all this work for you. You want me to help you. I finally found what she need. I could get you off the street. It was one of the coldest nights of the year. She was shivering, she only had a T-shirt and you're turning me down. She said, I'm waiting for somebody. We mean, you're waiting for somebody. And it just started clicking. I had a force. This is where, as cops, we get into that subjective mentality that us versus them. We get our prejudices and I forced myself to slow down and think what could possibly be that important. And she was waiting for her connection. And, yes, the old me would have still been furious. But I realized she's going to get dope sick One of the coldest nights of the year, and people dope sick often die or get taken advantage of. It's a misery that feels like they're dying. So she wasn't ready to go cold turkey. She wasn't ready to stop herself medicating for the trauma that she had suffered as a child and that was more important to her than walking with me to the other side of the city, away from everything she knew and everything that she was connected to, that helped her survive daily, and it was an epiphany moment. You know, if I'm going to have empathy, true empathy, is getting down there, into that abyss, with them and understanding the decisions they make. And I could still hold them accountable, because some people, as I tell others, some people just need to go to jail, that motherfucker right there. You need to go to jail because you're pillaging right now, you're just destroying your environment. But some people it's not going to help them, it's not going to motivate them, it's not going to change them, it's just going to further enhance their sense of self-deprecation and that they're worthless. If you want, I have one of the main stories in the book. I can tell you that the success part of that. There was another one, from the same community, as a matter of fact, who left behind her seven-year-old son and I was working one day around the holiday season and we were two-man teams. Because you're on foot patrol in San Francisco for safety, you double up. So while they were on break, a call came out for their beat and what we do is, like most departments, you monitor the radio and if something is urgent, you take it for your partner so that you finish eating, but if it's something that's not urgent and especially it's paper. You leave it for them because you get enough of your own. Well, I challenged myself because I realized if I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. I'm going to look into this because in the call it said that there was something about drug-related issues. Basically, a young woman had been stopped by one of our ferent inspectors and received a citation for not having a ticket stuck into the system. She used her sister's ID to get out of the ticket and probably because she had warrants and didn't want to get caught. Now her sister was on the hook for this failure to pay and she was trying to buy a house and it screwed up her. So she was at first furious, she was upset, she was crying, she wanted to, she wanted the problem fixed. But as I talked to her I realized she was crying more for her sister's condition situation and having lost her sister than really about what had happened. So I ran with a call. My partner, of course you know, oh, you want to take paper for us. My big partners are like yeah, absolutely, and we don't know you anything for it. So I took over the call. I spoke to a detective friend of mine off duty and asked him if he could clear out the case. And then I spoke to her about her sister. I went a little bit beyond just the crime and I found out that her father was extremely abusive, hardcore drug user, used to beat them and abuse them. It was a very rich community, like the other girl I mentioned. So she basically stereotypical female male relationship fell in with the bad boy, ended up burglarizing her own mother's home and was out of control. The mother kicked her out and basically took care of the son, her now her grandson. And trying to remember the name I used in the book because I don't want to accidentally say her real name, it'll come to me. Sorry, you're okay, I haven't had enough coffee, but she was on the street so I realized. The problem is how do I find her? You have a city, 8000, homeless, like I said, karan, 49 square miles. It's a city of thousands and I'm in the middle of the tenderloin. Great, okay, her sister wants me to help. Her wants me to find her, her sister who raised her like taking the place of their father. They were very close and wanted me to help, if possible, reconnect her to her son, who hadn't talked to a mommy in over half a year. So I went through the community and I realized just like in the jails and work, the jails, the shock callers, know everything. There's always a hierarchy of pecking order on the streets, in the jails and these groups and their clicks. So I had a good rapport with one of them. He was unfortunately one of the main fentanyl dealers and he would see when I was off duty, would see up on the steps of the library selling to the groups out there. But he knew everybody and at some point when he realized that I wasn't trying to, as they say, make a case on him, he started to work with me a little bit with help with finding people. He always talked to me and I had a rapport that I that he helped spread for me, which was I'm going to warn you if I say my cop hats on, all bets are off. If you're a crime and I'm arresting you, I'm taking you to Chalega, no choice. Yeah, if I tell you my cop had is off, I'm here as a case worker. I'm going to be the best little social worker the city's ever seen. That's all I care about. Just don't do anything stupid in front of me or anything violent and I have nothing to do with being a cop and at first, of course, they were suspicious, but they, over time, they became very trusting and to the point that people were even coming up to me and saying hey, who are you looking for today, hoff? Who are you? Who are you trying to find? Let me see what pictures you got, because the families would send me pictures. You know, have you seen my daughter? So the shot call or all of a sudden one day comes up to me and says hey, are you still looking for that sister? He said the name. Yeah, you know where she is. I know where she is right now. She's in a tent up the street by the safeway. He said I'm going to go tell her that you're cool, that you just want to talk to her, and she'll be walking down that sidewalk in about 10 or 15 minutes. So I parked the patrol car there, sat in the plaza watching the black market do its thing and, sure enough, 10, 15 minutes later I saw her coming down the sidewalk. I actually have pictures of the still shots of the exchange I had with her and I realized her issue was like most women. There's a difference in how the genders deal with trauma, men tend to lash out where the shooters, the violence, the fights. Women tend to lash in works and having walked away from her son and her family, she was devastated, living on the street, probably assaulted, feeling like I'm a worthless human being. What could I bring to my child? You know it's too late. Half a year has passed. He's better off without me and I did a little work with her and I convinced her that her son still loved her, which he did. I talked to the family, to him. He had a therapist and we found out that he loves sharks. So I bought a. My wife helped me buy a stuffed shark off of Amazon and we had mom write a message on it to him and we sent it to him, went crazy. We slept with it every night, sent pictures of him hugging it. I realized, okay, mommy didn't abandon me, mommy still loves me, eventually worked her up to the point she had enough courage to make that phone call and we reunited them on the phone Within weeks. She followed through on every appointment I made for her. She let me sign her up into the lead program, law enforcement assisted diversion, which is in a lot of states. She had case workers. I scheduled a appointment with her for the city doctor for Suboxone. She went and did it on her own Without me having to drive her or encourage her. The last time I saw her she was well dressed, clean, sober and she had been going back to the East Bay to interview for jobs at Target store. She used to be a manager at, I think, restaurants like Dennis. So I think she was testing or applying for managerial positions and was completely reunited with the son. They would speak every night. The family told me they talked every night on the phone and she was. The last couple of times I spoke to her. She was asking for help on how to get custody of her son back, full custody because of the court issues, right. So I realized this wasn't that hard, it wasn't that overwhelming. The results meant that not only did I help her but I probably saved the little boy from reliving, because children tend to relive our traumas. Yeah, a lot of the kids I saw in jail. They had the type of upbringing that they learned what they saw. So you can save future trauma from their children. You help a family heal and the community was buying in. So the community was doing the work. For me it was perpetuating itself. It wasn't this overwhelming, at least tactically. It wasn't overwhelming Emotionally, mentally. It was draining. It was draining because I would get those phone calls of someone who didn't make it. Some of the other officers would tell me hey, so and so they found her in a hotel, right when I'm in the middle getting them off the streets. And that's that leads to what they call empathy burnout.

Jerry: 24:47

So that was the hard part.

Eric: 24:49

That's my. That's my book in a nutshell, although I did write it in a priest police procedural style so that it's not touchy, feely, boring. It's cop to cop kind of language.

Jerry: 25:04

That's great. I mean, it's always fascinating to me to learn the circumstances that would lead to someone being homeless or making the choice to be homeless, right, I think that's always fascinating to to look at the homeless population and see, see that and just how they get there.

Eric: 25:28

That was what pushed my. We had a sheriff who called it professional curiosity. He used to tell us I want to see professional curiosity, I don't want to see you just handling calls or service. Get out there and look into things, be curious. And that's what I did. And I realized the one misca I call in the book with the four letters from Ivy League school. I looked at her and I looked at the nuclear scientists who was in the same hallway. What light, what set of experiences did they live that led to them being on the floor right here right now is a mental illness. Is it laziness? What is it? And that was part of the investigation and I realized the common denominator was trauma. And there is co occurring, which means that they could be mentally ill and addicted at the same time and have physical illnesses, dual diagnosis, mental health disorder, hand addiction. But the bottom line is, when you look at chicken of the egg which came first, there was almost always some kind of trauma in their past. Now, a lot of them had mental illness, like the nuclear scientist, schizophrenia and misca, some kind of paranoid, delusional type of mental illness, but that led them into a life of trauma by not treating it because when you're really smart and you can inspect nuclear reactors and you act strangely, people aren't as likely to force you into a mental health institution against your will as they are. They're just Joe Schmuck on the street, you know, fixing cars for a living. So a lot of these people were also smart as they are, knew how to play the system. I had one Holocaust survivor grandmother. Her mother was extremely mentally ill. From her mother, the Holocaust survivor passed it on down generational and she was always walking around barefoot winter with rags for clothing covered in lice parasites. You could see them from a distance just undulating all over her, completely out of her mind. She spoke to the father, the adopted father, who was a physician, who said that every time she gets institutionalized she knows exactly what to tell the shrinks. They medicate her, she gets rational long enough. She tells them what they want to hear. She knows what to say, what to do. They can't legally hold her anymore. Kick her out the street, right back in the system. And that is what I dealt with that revolving door, one of the books, I think I called him Joseph, one of the chapters, I'm sorry in the book and I spoke about this revolving door about how. He would even tell me that, hey, when I'm out of my mind I'll eat the pain off the walls. Be careful. He actually warned me to be safe around him because he knew that he would lose his his shit when he was off his meds. He wasn't even really a drug user. He used anything, maybe pot, but his mother was an addict in vitro. So he was born with conditions and then life on the street was so traumatic he ended up living in a bar station doing disgusting things, pulling parasites out of his groin here and popping them on the ground and upsetting the passengers walking by, calling 911, taking pictures, saying why aren't you doing something about this? Well, what do you want us to do? I can't. He's got issues and we get him fixed, we get a medicated and he's doing great and he loves being medicated. But then he starts forgetting to go or he has trouble living homeless getting to the clinic and then his med regimen starts to flounder and then he cycles back into that mental illness. And with the drug users, when they become rational, they have to face the pain that led them down that road in the first place. One, one girl I mentioned in the book. She told me she had been sexually assaulted at a pretty prestigious college during a party. That led to more alcohol use, led to more trauma and eventually led to heroin. Where I met her in the stations Came from a very wealthy family in San Francisco who didn't know what to do or how to get her off the streets. She would get rational, sober, clear headed when trying to rehab, but then all the pain of everything she had been through would come back. And whether or not you condone drug use, that is their medication. The drugs themselves don't make you an addict. Or if they do, everybody's ever been given fentanyl after surgery or an opiate pill after breaking a limb would be an addict. You know this pill handed out to millions of people, but some of them have genetic predisposition or this trauma in their past and the ends up the pills, the drugs, they. It numbs all the pain, the physical pain, the psychological pain. Look at how many athletes ended up being addicts after fixing a problem. Now they can't stop, even though the physical element is fixed. There was some, there was something else there. They're feeling emotional anxiety, something, and there's studies that show that emotional and mental pain can be more painful, register on a higher scale than physical pain. A lot of us feel pain differently too. So I realized, when I'm talking to these people, I got to get to know their past. I got to get to know the person. How are you dealing with what you're dealing and why? Why are you addicted? You either like stimulants or you like depressants. Usually that's he called your drug of choice. Why are you smoking meth every day? Oh, you're smoking meth every day because when you do heroin you're not going to get a good amount of drugs. When you do heroin, you pass out and get raped. If you smoke meth, then you can be awake and alert. Now you're going on three, four days with no sleep, smoking stimulants and taking depressants and they start to lose their mind. That's when you see the videos of them ripping off their clothes and running through traffic. I wrote about one guy I saw running down the street naked with a like crime scene tape, waving it like they do in the Olympics in a banner the middle of the street, just doing wild stuff. Because if you don't have mental health issues when you start using drugs, you're probably going to later, especially for the women, because now they're in the cycle. I spoke to one who told me she came up from Los Angeles to be a to get into the drug scene in San Francisco. She said man, I came here addicted to one drug. I'm going back to Los Angeles addicted to everything Opiates, stimulants, you name it. It's just all there and available and the city doesn't prosecute for possession. So there was no incentive. That's the reason why that program wasn't failed, by the way.

Jerry: 32:47

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, eric, I mean this has got to, like you said, you know, empathy burnout and stuff like that. This has got to take a toll on you. You know, working these cases so hard and diligently and then having some non desirable outcomes, you know. I mean, how did that affect you personally, like long term?

Eric: 33:10

Well, I had a tough time my childhood so I wanted to law enforcement. As I was told later I was chasing the trauma dragon being. It was cool, it was exciting, but I worked patrolling the jails and that was it Because I wanted to be a cop and that was cop work, but I didn't realize how much trauma that was exposing myself to. In the book we talk a little bit about how much trauma the average officer sees and is exposed to every six months. I think it's three significant events every six months. And then it peaked with me as I talked about the reason why I left. There was a CHP officer who was shot and killed. I was first on scene, it was in my beat and I was there while they were doing CPR trying to bring him back. The suspect was still in the vehicle and, as it was explained to me later, ptsd. The amount of PTSD you get is going to be based on your expectations of a situation in relation to the reality of the situation. In my head I thought it was a downed officer, maybe in motorcycle crash, because all we heard was 1199 being screened by a partner. Everybody, 1199, everybody in anything with a gun and badge. Get over here Now, emergency stop what you're doing. So I was thinking bad, but I wasn't thinking like that. And when I get there I'm seeing this. It looked like violent CPR in the middle of the freeway While the suspect was actually still alive, and then I got both put on the stretchers next to each other and it just it felt sickening to see that. I went to the funeral and I had been through some really bad stuff before that. There was an assassination attempt on my life on a car stop. Once I almost died in the garage trying to pull a suicidal subject out. It was car running and we couldn't get trapped. None of that affected me. The way this did the something it was the proverbial straw and that led to what I realized years now later was the beginning of what they call complex PTSD. Ptsd acute is right here right now. Something happened. Lieutenant Grossman talks about it in his books and even talks about stress and noctulation how to prepare yourself or prevent the effects of what could be PTSD related events on your mental health. You talked about how one guy could go through multiple combat situations, come back no PTSD, and there's another guy who was just in a car wreck in Afghanistan and he's got PTSD. So it affects you differently and when it hits you is almost unpredictable. At least for me was. I didn't know these things then. Now what I learned later is that if you suffer trauma in your childhood and you suffer trauma as an adult and there's really no break from your brain to slow down and decompress and digest what you went through emotionally and mentally, it builds up like a explain, like a cup in the back of the head and back of the mind. And with police work you wake up every day. You have a routine. You put on your uniform the same way, you get your gear ready, the same way you check your car out, you have call services. There's always something to do to keep your mind distracted. When I hit retirement and all of a sudden all my distractions ended, now it's just me alone with my thoughts. Stuff started to bubble up and I'd find myself daydreaming. They call it disassociation. I'd find myself just not wanting to work out, just kind of being a slump Like you know. Why bother? Why get up and go shower right now, I'm just going to keep watching TV. This is more entertaining. No one's going to smell me on the couch and you're embarrassed to say it, for me to say it now, but it creeps up on you and I hit a breaking point. It affected my family, my relationship with my wife and kids. They had enough. They wanted to break away from me and that's when I realized something's wrong. I had horrible anxiety. I always felt like something bad was about to happen. My startle reflex from loud noises was just out of control and I went and got help and I was very, very fortunate that the doctor who helped me was very familiar with complex PTSD. It is such a new diagnosis that it's not even in the DSM-5. My belief is that it's something that came out of the combat vets that are coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, that they're realizing that this is different. It's like PTSD on steroids. It affects you differently. It's more insidious. It has a deep grip into how you behave angry all the time, irritated, feeling disassociated, disconnected, numb and dead inside. I didn't realize then well, I did kind of realize a little bit that when I'm looking at a traumatized person like a dead child I once had a tenured hung himself all I went to wondering why am I so dead inside? I should be upset at this. Yet I'm watching movies and I'm feeling an emotional rise over something I know is not real. This is not normal, but I would shuffle it off. Okay, whatever, that's just my brain handled it. Now. Fine, what's the worst that can happen? I won't drink alcohol, I won't do drugs, obviously I won't do anything stupid, I won't gamble, so I'll be good. What's the worst that can happen? And I experienced what's the worst that can happen. I went through a break. I couldn't sleep at night. The anxiety alone was enough during the daytime, but at night couldn't stop the ruminations Because of the lack of sleep. I actually started to hallucinate, which I didn't know was a thing. I'd see just little movements and thought I saw my son standing in the doorway looking at me, when he wasn't there. What the hell is this? Am I becoming like the people that I helped? Is this because I did their work? Cops on the street who were homeless and addicted to drugs? It scared the hell out of me, that's. I said okay, I got to do something about this, and that doctor explained to me how it worked. He explained to me how trauma is. Putting a name to it made all the difference, because you think, when you're losing your mind, that you're broken or something you're defective. I got to feel what the homeless people I worked with felt to be dysfunctional and broken. It's something that can't be fixed. I'm 57 years old. What am I going to do now? I can't start over again. But by giving it a name I realized no, I got a condition and conditions can be treated. Conditions have an outcome. The insidious part is BPD borderline personality disorder and NPD narcissistic personality disorder. The two of them are identical in symptoms to complex PTSD. The only way to tell them apart, according to the doctor who kind of laughed about it, is people with complex PTSD suffer trauma, or NPD and PPD. They didn't you still have your empathy, and boy did I still have my empathy. That's why I was just upset all the time. I couldn't stop getting upset at the stupidest things. So, having that diagnosis, I realized I could look up this thing and understand it. And when I looked at it, bpd and NPD have a very, very low recovery rate. I think it's like 9%. Complex PTSD was 87% recovery, incredibly high for any condition. So my family saw that they're like oh my God, if you do the work, we didn't realize you weren't an out just. Well, I was an asshole. You weren't just an asshole Just because yeah, this is what complex PTSD does. You're angry all the time, you're snappy, you're just. Everything is irritating to you. You just want to be a little hermit, throw them in a world and not have anything bother you, and it was hard to face, but by having a name to it made all the difference in the world for me to have the will, the motivation to deal with it. Because the most important thing I learned working with a homeless and addiction and mental illness is motivation, and timing is the key. When people say we don't know what to do, it's obviously everything we're doing. Is it working? Nothing will fix it. We can't throw money. The answer is easy. The problem is is people can't get out of their own way. Their ideology is getting away, which is it's doing the work, it's understanding that you have to have the motivation in the first place to want to change things, and then you have to have the timing, which is when I'm ready. I need to have the resources ready to go With me. It was easy because I was lucky enough to have health insurance, I was lucky enough to have a supportive family, but people on the streets didn't have that. They're by themselves. So you'd look at somebody saying why doesn't he just get up and fix himself? Just go to rehab. You could have a rehab detox center on every corner street corner in this country and it will not make a single bit of difference because they have to want to change. If you're telling somebody who's been traumatized, horribly traumatized in their life, I'm going to take away your medication. What makes you feel less pain? And you're going to have to face all these demons, finally, that where's the motivation? Give them the motivation. They don't care. A lot of them don't care. If I die, at least I'll be numb, at least I won't feel this pain that tears me up every day. What's the point of my existence? So I realized motivating them is the key, like the motivation I found myself. And then, when they're ready, I can't just hand them a pamphlet, I can't just make an appointment, which is what every single place in the city I call, every resource center, every outreach unit and case worker oh, eric, tell them to make an appointment tomorrow morning. Tell them to come back on a Monday at 8 am and stand in line. 10 minutes from now they're not even going to remember talking to me. Yeah, pass out with a needle in their leg. What the hell are you doing? And I realized that outreach and services are a nine to five endeavor. But these people are 24 hours and a lot of them did come to me at night asking for help and I understood what they were going through, but the system didn't care or wouldn't understand because they couldn't get out of their own way. All they cared about. As long as we don't put them in jail, as long as we're not mean to them, we give them free needles, give them free crack pipes, give them their alcohol so they don't go to DTs. That's harm reduction. They're good. And yeah, I did what you're doing. I shook my head and said are you kidding me? This is you're putting the bullet in the gun that's in their mouth by doing this. That's not harm reduction. Harm reduction is treating that duality which I talk about in the book of Jekyll and Hyde. Do you want to give you a quick explanation of that? Yeah, if you think about it. Think about you know somebody who's an alcoholic right, and it's affecting his job. I wrote the chapters, the title of his. A guy walks into a bar. I'll give you the synopsis. You know it's affecting his life. He's not. He's late for work, he's going to get fired or he's getting in trouble. He's losing money. His family's getting ready to leave him. You want to talk to him about getting help. You go in and talk to him during happy hour when he's pounding back the half price drinks and say dude, you're killing yourself. Let's do something about this. Now imagine the next day where he's waking up late for work again after being put on probation and told he's going to get fired if he's late again. It's waking up late again. His family is gone because they're sick of it. He's lost or losing everything. Have that same conversation with that person now. You think that's going to be a different conversation than in the bar during happy hour Completely, but that's how the system behaves. Yeah, if they want to do drugs, let them do drugs. I'm going to keep offering them help. Well, they're high they're. They're. They ain't feeling nothing, they're skipping along the street. I used to tell the case workers you don't want help right now, he just wants to get his next hit. You got to wait until they're in jail. You got to wait until they're miserable and waking up with the shakes. That's when you have that conversation with them. That's when you say, hey, man. That's when you speak to what I call the Jekyll, the person inside who's emerging saying I'm sick of living like this, I don't want to do this. Well, you don't. Let's go right now, before you see your dealer again. Let's do it right now, and you know what they would. I had one jump in my patrol car Michael, one of the worst heroin addicts we had out there. I have a picture of him passed out on the steps, great basketball player. He didn't care that he was getting into a patrol car in front of everybody because, you know, no snitching, don't? He jumped right by the back. I took him to the clinic and he got in line to get a suboxone. He was ready to go. Unfortunately, you fled out the door because they made him sit around for an hour and a half next to other addicts and when he got the meds, the prescription, he would have to walk across the city because you'd only had an hour and a half to get to the pharmacy that would give him a prescription. Yet the city marked that up as a win. When they get their grants, that says, hey, how many people did you connect to services? We connected Michael. He got a prescription for a suboxone. Really, where is he now? Oh, he's homeless again doing drugs again. But we had a win here. Give us some more grant money 80% on that note. That reminds me that 80% of those who got housed ended up back on the streets within 30 days, but that 100% we're all counted as 100% wins. We housed 100 people it doesn't matter, 80 of them back on the streets. One was building a bonfire in the middle of the apartment they gave because they don't know how to live indoors. So another reason I'm against the housing first programs If you don't address the issues, get them on the house. It's not going to do anything. But give them a quiet place to overdose and die or burn the place down. Makes sense, makes sense. So that's the synopsis of the work that I wrote about in the book.

Jerry: 49:06

Eric, that's all super fascinating. I mean I definitely could have this conversation for hours listening to these stories about the different people and how do you try to help them and what the system is doing and not doing and how it can be fixed. It's kind of eye-opening to me from listening to you, to your perspective out on the street dealing with large groups of homeless and their addicted to drugs or personality disorders. So I appreciate all those stories. It gives me a new perspective on things.

Eric: 49:44

That's what I hope for. I know I worked hard to change my perspective. I wrote the book with the purpose. It's free on Kiddnell Limited because I just want to get the message out. I just want to change perspectives and that's the work we're doing with the nonprofit right now Changing perspectives, doing the work that needs to be done, that the system turns its back to. Yeah.

Jerry: 50:07

Eric, where can people find you to learn more about the nonprofit and learn more about your book?

Eric: 50:14

The nonprofit is Veritas Foundation Inc. One wordorg, but we're still in the middle of getting it up and running. It's a mom and pop thing husband and wife, mom and pop so we have to apply to get some grants first. To get it off the ground we're doing just a little bit on our own with what we can afford. The book is on Amazon and it's also in Audible now. We just got that put out a couple of weeks ago. So if you have Kiddnell Limited, it's free. If you have Audible credits, it's free. It's a short read. It's only, I think, 160 pages and I tried to. I'm told it's getting great reviews, that it's not boring, it's not touchy. Feel you just got to love them and hug them. It's not what you're looking for because I know I got a lot of meat eaters out there who listen to this when I call them. I had a lot of marine friends. I know how they are. I even joke about that a little bit in the book.

Jerry: 51:11

Eric, what's the name of the book?

Eric: 51:13

again, what Doesn't Kill you? One Pops Respective on Mental Illness, Homelessness and Addiction. And if you think of the Google, my Name it comes up. Or if you type in my name on Amazon, they have like an author search.

Jerry: 51:32

Yeah, that's great. It'll be in the show notes and well, and on the End During the Badge Podcast webpage as well. There'll be lots of places that people can find this information and reach out to you. Maybe they can help you with your nonprofit, with some donations, and get this up and going, always willing to accept help of any kind.

Eric: 51:53

Yeah, that's how it works, you gotta help each other it's true, it's very true, eric.

Jerry: 51:58

thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Thank you.

Eric: 52:02

Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you for giving me the time and doing what you do to get these messages out to the world.

Jerry: 52:08

Yeah, thank you, man. It's always super fascinating for me to listen to my guest stories. They're incredible.

Eric: 52:18

Well, it's not a very pro cop anymore. I don't think. It's definitely not the job I signed up for, yeah. So guys like you are helping get that positive message out there and we appreciate it. Sad seeing the state of affairs for law enforcement these days.

Jerry: 52:34

Definitely, definitely Well, thanks again. Thanks again for listening. Don't forget to rate and review the show wherever you access your podcast. If you know someone that would be great on the show, please get ahold of our host, jerry Dean Lund, through the Instagram handles at Jerry Byron Fuel or at Enduring the Badge podcast, also by visiting the show's website Enduringthebadgepodcastcom for additional methods of contact and up to date information regarding the show. Remember, the views and opinions expressed during the show solely represent those of our hosts and the current episode's guests.