EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS A GREAT STORY
Richard Drain   Growing up in Philadelphia, the only contact that Richard Drain had with white people was with police, judges, and probation officers. Richard’s world started to expand when he went into the military. It was during the war in Vietnam, and the world was tumultuous. And though Richard wasn’t sent to Southeast Asia, his inner world was beginning to become tumultuous also.
He began hearing voices. He became violent. He began to use drugs.
Once Richard was discharged from the military, he moved into his mother’s house with his girlfriend and their children. His mother passed away not long after, and things began to spiral out of control. Richard’s girlfriend also suffered from mental illness, and in response to her “voices,” she cut their daughter’s throat. The little girl survived, but the family did not.
Richard’s girlfriend moved out. Incapacitated by his own paranoid delusions, which he tried to control with drugs and alcohol, Richard could not provide for the children. He sent them to the Virgin Islands to be raised by their grandparents.
He could no longer pay the mortgage on the home his mother had left him. He returned from work one day to find an officer from the Sheriff’s Department who had come to evict him.
Richard slept in playgrounds. He survived on the streets however he could.
One night, staying with friends in a crack house, Richard had had enough and tried to kill himself. Rather than provide him badly needed love and support, his friends kicked him out, afraid he would scare off their business.
During those years, Richard also began dealing drugs to survive. He was arrested and went before numerous courts; but the process took a long time, and before he could be convicted, he disappeared from the criminal justice system. “I was a fugitive,” Richard says, “running from pillar to post, from street to street.”
While living on the streets, Richard went into a soup kitchen one day and met Brenda Cooper-Kuttz of the Philadelphia Health Management Corporation. At her suggestion, he tried staying in the shelters, but they were not great. He found himself sleeping on the floor, sleeping in vomit.
Brenda had also referred him to the Access Project, a drop-in center in West Philadelphia that provided support for people with the co-occurring disorders of mental illness and addiction. There he met Bill Miller.
Brenda and Bill saw in Richard what no one had seen in a very long time—a human being with great potential. Almost everyone else had written him off long ago, including his family and old friends from the neighborhood. But Brenda and Bill told him about Horizon House, a program that could help Richard with vocational training and other support, including subsidized housing.
It was 1995. Richard stopped using drugs and began attending 12-step meetings so that he could get into the Horizon House program. He got an apartment and began taking vocational classes. He was told about potential employment as a Departmental Aide with the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Behavioral Health. Although he wanted the job, Richard was still running from his old legal charges, and could not go to work for the city until they were cleared.
Though he was facing 7 ½ to 15 years in prison, Richard knew he could not get on with his future until he had faced his past. Describing his emotional state at the time, Richard says that he “stepped out on faith and turned myself in to the courts.” He stood before the same judge he had seen years earlier and told his story. Moved by Richard’s courage and determination, the judge sentenced him to 2 years parole and one year probation—no jail time.
All told, Richard was homeless for 11 years. Now he was beginning a job with the City’s Office of Behavioral Health, a job he has now held since 1997. Richard also became involved in many other community programs, serving on Philadelphia HCH’s Consumer Advisory Board and as the Financial Secretary of a community development corporation that brings low-income housing and after school programs into Richard’s neighborhood. He is also a member of the District Attorney’s Youth Aid Panel, a program intended to divert troubled youth away from the traditional criminal justice system. He is constantly using his own story to help others along their journeys.
Richard says that when he got clean, he “began to see things in color.” He was aware of things he had not noticed in years. On one winter day, he turned to a friend and said, “It’s snowing. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen snow.” The friend told him he was crazy, that it snows every winter. Richard responded, “Yeah, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen it.”
Once he started in his new job, he also became friends with people of all backgrounds and all skin colors. For the first time, he wasn’t looking at white people from across the desk r across a courtroom. Instead, he was working next to them in the same office—equals.
After Richard had been in his Horizon House apartment for a year, an amazing thing happened. He was reunited with his “childhood sweetheart,” Cassandra. They were married 5 years ago and now have their own house. He has reconnected with his children. “I’m joyous, happy, and pretty free,” Richard says, with a voice full of a contentment that cannot be contained.
Of course, Richard is aware daily that his illnesses do not just go away. He suffers from chronic back pain and bouts of depression. “My mental illness crept up on me again last summer,” he says in resignation. But he is sober. And he is content.
When I ask Richard about his experience living without a home, he says that “homelessness can happen to anyone at any time. Homelessness is an epidemic…it should be listed on the CDC’s list of epidemics down there in Atlanta.”
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