Supportive housing in Hamilton County is the focus of this week’s Fridays With Larry podcast, now posted in both video and audio versions below.

Hamilton County can look like a place where housing insecurity and serious mental illness happen somewhere else. They don’t. We almost certainly cross paths every day with people living with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress or other conditions. Some are receiving care. Others are struggling quietly.

Housing instability here can be hard to see. It may mean sleeping in a car, moving between motel rooms, staying temporarily with relatives, or living one missed paycheck from eviction. Housing is expensive throughout Hamilton County — and the search gets much harder for someone leaving a psychiatric hospital or another treatment program, who may have limited income, interrupted employment, damaged credit or no recent rental history.

A hospital can stabilize symptoms and write a discharge plan. A discharge paper cannot provide a safe place to sleep. Stable housing should not be treated as a reward someone receives after recovery. For many people, it is one of the tools that makes recovery possible.

My guest this week is Kelli Hoffman, co-executive director of Healthy & Dwell, a Noblesville-based nonprofit founded by psychiatric nurse practitioner Ronda Owens-Dehmer. The organization operates a three-bedroom supportive housing home in Noblesville, where residents pay 30% of their income toward rent and utilities and receive life-skills coaching and help navigating benefits and appointments. Hoffman says the home has gone three years without a single 911 call, two of the three residents are employed, and the group is now working with an architect and Paradigm Construction and Development on an expansion of two-bedroom, two-bath duplexes in Noblesville. Healthy & Dwell receives no federal or state funding and operates entirely on private donations.

Also this week: some genuinely good news out of the cancer research world, as Merck and Moderna report the first successful late-stage trial of a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine — and a South Carolina man chasing a Guinness World Record with more than 2,000 pairs of socks.

Thanks as always to Citizens State Bank for sponsoring the podcast.

You can watch this week’s podcast at this link, just listen using this link, or use the links below..