Depending on the state, there are social workers whose sole job is to reach out to and guide homeless people towards these and other programs. The experience r

Depending on the state, there are social workers whose sole job is to reach out to and guide homeless people towards these and other programs. The experience related to me by one of these people is that the mentally ill homeless tend to not trust social workers, believing (wrongly) that they'll be institutionalized if they accept any help at all. The sad result is that they only way many of these people will get any health care is if they are, in fact, institutionalized, because they refuse every other effort to get it.