https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/opinion/drug-crisis-addiction-harm-reduction.html
The streets are a terrifying and deeply uncomfortable place to live. Ms. Corso found that poor personal hygiene was often strategic — a woman who smelled disgusting was far less likely to be raped — and that sleep deprivation and sleep psychosis were at least as common as serious mental illness. She and Mr. Webb knew people who used heroin to sleep or meth to stay awake when they were too afraid to close their eyes.
She also found that a snack, a cigarette, a drink of water and a nap could solve 90 percent of a client’s immediate distress and that providing those things was the fastest way to build rapport. She liked to joke that her experience as a cocktail waitress was at least as useful as any coursework or prior counseling jobs she had done. “It’s not like people are summoned to our office for sit-down therapy,” she said. “It’s more like I walk the intake room striking up conversations and trying to upsell people on services. I am basically a cocktail waitress who serves mental health.”
It was tricky work, she said. Most of the people she sees have survived severe traumas — rape, molestation, physical abuse — that they had never discussed with another human or even grappled with themselves. For many of them, conversations in her office or around OnPoint are their first meaningful human interactions after something horrific.