The Annual One Night Count of homeless people living outside of a shelter in King County just came to an end. The count covers all of King County with 125 teams of counters total and 40 teams localized in Seattle. More than 800 volunteers throughout the county tallied 2,826 homeless people. This is a 2% increase over last year’s count of 2,631. The official number for Seattle is 1,976 which is the exact same amount as in 2008. A longer post is in the works on where the increase in homeless population is localized and who was having sex while being counted.

14 replies on “Counting the Homeless”

  4. Hey the stranger,

    I’d encourage whatever blog post is following dealing with the localization of homeless folks be wary of being too specific– this info can be used by the authorities to target homeless encampments (official data released from the count is kept intentionally vague).

  6. My apologies, I was too lazy to type out ‘multiple personality disorder’. Should have used the colloquial ‘schizos’ instead. Me bad!

  7. Perhaps homegirl you should volunteer to help your community instead of perpetuating sterotypes and minimizing the very large issue of homelessness in our area and in our country

  10. Homegirl…you are obviously too retarded to understand what lily was saying. She wasn’t commenting on your lack of typing out “multiple personalities.” S/he was commenting on the fact that schizophrenia has NOTHING to do with multiple personalities or multiple personality disorder. And, in case you didn’t get that, “schizos” which is an abbreviated form of the word “schizophrenics” also has NOTHING to do with multiple personalities.

    Multiple personality disorder is now usually referred to as dissociative identity disorder where the person will often dissociate into different selves, but this disorder in its full-fledged Sybil-esque version is VERY RARE.

    Schizophrenia is a completely different disorder that has NOTHING to do with multiple personalities or selves. People with schizophrenia usually have some combination of delusions (which are false, usually abnormal, beliefs), hallucinations (which encompass seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, etc. things that are not really there) and disordered thinking and/or speaking. There are many types of schizophrenia including paranoid and catatonic. There are also people who have schizoaffective disorder who have schizophrenia in addition to some kind of mood disorder.

    While the causes of these diseases are not fully understood, it is generally thought that schizophrenia is a partially genetic disorder that is brought on by things that are activated by the environment. Sort of the way that other diseases work, for example, CANCER. Do you laugh at cancer patients and make fun of them too? Just curious.

    DID (dissociative identity disorder) or what used to be called MPD (multiple personality disorder) normally manifests in people who have been SEVERELY abused as children. Maybe you also think that is hilarious. Not sure.

    Anyway, homegirl, I hope this helps you to be less ill-informed. I don’t think it will help you to be less stupid though.

  12. I was apart of the downtown Seattle homeless count last night and I assure you that my team was completely respectful of each situation we encountered. We spoke in whispers, quietly treking through some really rough territory – we did not report to anyone were we found the encampments and we did not wake anyone up that was not already awake. We covered a lot of territory and I for one am humbled by the experience.

  13. @11: I’m not trying to be politically correct. I am trying to be correct with definitions. I’m sorry that using the word “retarded” is not PC these days, but it is obvious that some people are in fact retarded. Also, I don’t mind if people use the terms schizophrenic or multiple personality, but if they are using them incorrectly it is annoying.

    And, okay, so I’m being flippant by calling Homegirl “retarded,” but considering the level of intellect that Homegirl was showing I figured it was a word that s/he could understand and GET MY DRIFT with. Homegirls’s comments were about as savvy as a mean and nasty 13-year-old’s taunting, so, yah, why should it bother me to call her/him “retarded?” I don’t actually think that the term “retarded” is used as a clinical definition for people who have verifiable mental retardation, so who am I really insulting anyway? Would it have been better for me to say that Homegirl was too “slow” to understand? It is the same thing, just a different choice of words. Sorry to be so un-PC, but do I have to be PC or kind with people who are willfully ignorant and obviously mean?

    And, yah, anyway, my post wasn’t about political correctness anyway.

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