the vast, vast majority of the entire country's homeless population is mentally ill. That's the dirty secret about America. We don't really have facilities for the mentally ill, certainly not free ones. Like in the entire state of Texas, there is only two (or maybe it's one now) mental hospital. For parents of mentally ill individuals, what normally happens is once that individual becomes an adult, the parents spend the rest of their lives hand cuffed to them until they either die or can't bare it anymore, and in the long run, those mentally ill people wind up on the streets. I used to office in down town Houston and would give money to the same homeless people every day, and the vast majority of them were very obviously mentally ill. I'd even had people flip out on me while I was giving them money. It's pretty heart breaking.