Mercedes Bermudez
Staff Writer

University of Chicago Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann visited Pomona College and presented “Chicago’s Netherworld: An Ethnography of Psychosis on the Streets" earlier this month.

To be homeless, you must have lost something that you called home, Luhrmann told her audience of students, faculty and community members at the Claremont college.

Luhrmann studied homeless women in the Chicago area, who move around from shelters to jails to hospitals and back to the streets. Although help is offered them, many of these women refuse help.

Luhrmann said the main reason these women don’t accept help is that want to feel they can lift themselves up on their own.

For her research, Luhrmann and her team of students put themselves in the streets with these women.

They went to the streets and the shelters following homeless women through their daily encounters. These homeless women had very little privacy on the streets. They had to sleep, shower and go to the bathroom in public. Work, shelter and money are available for these women, but many reject such services because receiving them them would mean admitting they have a mental illness.

“It’s a real shocker that these women ... do not want to admit that they are mentally ill and receive a bed,” said Amanda Nemeth, a psychology major at Pomona College. “Its hard to understand why these women do what they do because the majority of them don’t belong in the streets.”

Some of the women Luhrmann worked with are not chronically homeless. Different from the stereotypical rags and filthy appearance, these women are dressed decently and are clean: They just have a problem getting off the streets due to their mental illness.

“It was a total eye-opener from an outsider who didn’t know about the system and what these people actually go through,” said Erin Rodriguez an art history major at Pomona College. “It was heart-breaking to hear (of their) suffering. Its hard to understand what has happened to these Americans to get to (that) places both physically and mentally.”

Mercedes Bermudez can be reached at mbermudez@ulv.edu.