Social worker Jonathan Foiles has written about Chicago’s fractured mental health system before. In a January 2018 report for Belt Magazine on the current state of the city’s mental health, he included an intimate story about a client named Anthony who’d lost his son to gun violence on the city’s west side. Using Anthony as an example, Foiles addressed the inadequacy of the city’s mental health system in treating similar clients. That story, however, was just grazing the surface.
This City Is Killing Me highlights five of Foiles’s clients’ stories (their names and any identifying details have been changed for confidentiality), all with different experiences that address flaws within Chicago’s public systems, including Illinois’s Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), the Chicago Housing Authority, and Chicago Public Schools.
Foiles is aware that fixing the system won’t be easy. His book is not an attempt to solve any of these issues, nor is it an effort to make you feel sorry for his clients. “Rather, I want you to see them,” he writes, “to be forced to confront the impact that policy decisions have upon the lives of our city’s poorest residents.” v
By Jonathan Foiles Belt Publishing
