Jonathan Shapiera reveals how being homeless led to devastating health conditions and his son being half blind

The shocking health impacts of homelessness have been laid bare by a Rockingham resident who has not only suffered life-threatening repercussions from long-term living on the streets, but also his son is going half blind. After Jonathan Shapiera lost his work contract and was unable to pay rent, he and his teenage son moved into their car, unaware that’s the place they’d call home for the next three years. It’s been almost eight years since they got a roof back over their heads, but both are still feeling the devastating consequences of living rough, with poor diet playing a major role in their ill health. Without anywhere to refrigerate fresh food or cook, they existed on takeaways and Mr Shapiera — who is not a smoker or a drinker — says that huge nutrition deficiency had a massive impact. “Most of the long term people who are coming off the street, it does appears in a couple of years after, the medical problems just start to eventuate,” he told The West Australian. “Diabetes is my problem: I’ve now got two carers a day, my sugar levels really plummet and it pretty much caused my heart attack back in April and I had to go through a quad bypass. “Nearly three years on the street aggravated my diabetic condition.” That lack of refrigeration wreaked havoc with Mr Shapiera’s insulin, rendering it “worthless” on days when temperatures rose above 25C. “The chemicals break down ... it’s like injecting water into your veins, it’s not helping at all.” His son, who asked to remain anonymous, suffered an ocular disorder seemingly caused or at the very least aggravated by poor diet. “He’s had one eye operated on, which they reckon they’ve actually saved but it’s the other eye that is now a problem ... there’s really nothing we can do about it,” Mr Shapiera said. “It’s a case of, it was got at late. So we’re stuck with the fact that his vision is now very badly impaired.” Mr Shapiera, 65, also sustained spinal cord damage from sleeping squished up in a car, requiring a surgical procedure known as laminectomy. “That was purely just to allow the spinal cord to breathe again. If I didn’t have the laminectomy, I would have been a paraplegic,” he said. That’s not even the full list of his health troubles, which on the streets can mean staph infections just from getting a scratch and not having bandages or disinfectant to treat it. Mr Shapiera said he wanted help others experiencing homelessness by raising awareness of their health plight and planned to see if a program could be rolled out in Perth this summer to help diabetics living rough to refrigerate their insulin. “Research needs to be done .... what happens to these guys and girls in the long term as they’re coming off the street,” he said. “I would have cost the taxpayer in the vicinity, medically, well over $1 million. “It would have been far cheaper for the government to look at getting me off the street. And now I’ve got a $500,000 NDIS package. “How long this is going to go for, I don’t know. My understanding is the rest of my life.” Mr Shapiera’s comments coincide with a major new report by the WA Alliance to End Homelessness suggesting the prevalence of various conditions including dehydration, dental problems and skin infections had worsened during the pandemic. “People have got multiple illnesses, multiple health conditions,” Australian Alliance to End Homelessness chief executive David Pearson said. “There’s a chicken and egg thing here: did the poor health cause the homelessness or did the homelessness cause poor health? “It’s both for different people at different points in time.” The wide-ranging report, which collated vast volumes of data, also highlighted alarming rates of mental illness, with depression topping the list at almost 70 per cent according to one set of numbers. Paul Flatau, director of The University of Western Australia’s Centre for Social Impact, also pointed to “incredible” rates of post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, while it was still mainly men living on the streets, young women sleeping rough “are in a worse position on average across the board”, he said. The report also found the number of people suffering homelessness in WA who had accessed government-funded services over the past five years had surged by 39 per cent. The nation’s highest clients rates were found in the State’s outback northern region. While comprising just 3.1 per cent of the general population, a staggering 51 per cent of Specialist Homelessness Services Collection clients identified as Aboriginal in 2020-21. “This data is showing how disproportionately impacted Aboriginal people in WA are by homelessness,” Mr Pearson said. “That is very confronting and is a trend that is not heading in the right direction.”