Okyere—who concentrated in economics and lived in Currier House while she was at the College—earned a masters degree from the University of Oxford after her graduation from Harvard and held jobs as a consultant and an analyst before succumbing to mental illness, according to Frimpong.

For more than a year in the Square, she grew thinner and weaker, all the while acquiring more and more bags of belongings.

For Okyere, as for many, poor mental health was a slippery slope to life on the streets.

“Agatha is a very highly educated woman,” says the mental health expert familiar with her case. “She’s had some traumatic exposure in the past that brought on her mental illness.”

For a homeless person living with mental illness, finding psychiatric treatment is the first step to escaping life on the streets. But for many, even receiving treatment requires luck and perseverance.

“They have to go through a lot of red tape,” says Michelle Kuo ’03, who directed the Harvard Square Shelter at University Lutheran Church (UniLu) last year, “and they need funding. They have to be on Medicare.”

But even those eligible for mental health care may have trouble getting inside a specialist’s office. Some, like Okyere, might be resistant to the idea.

Okyere initially refused help because she did not realize the severity of her own symptoms, the mental health expert familiar with her case says.

The same is true for many homeless individuals.

“They have lost the ability to make right decisions,” the expert explains.

And with no family, they can easily end up hungry, shelterless and almost invisible to the daily Square traffic that passes them each day.

Okyere finally gained the mental treatment she needed after HUPD arrested her.

“We needed to initiate the arrest in order to get her into the system,” Catalano says. “In this case, an arrest for Agatha helped.”

Homelessness and the Law

Homelessness itself is by no means a crime. And unless a mentally ill person agrees to be taken to the hospital, police can only bring the person in for treatment if they deem him or her dangerous.