HEALTH CARE CAMPAIGN

Health Care Campaign

Mental Illness and Homelessness

It is widely known that many people who have mental health problems experience homelessness and that homelessness can itself cause mental health problems. Becoming homeless is a huge event in our lives and almost always causes the problems that we already have to become greater and more difficult to cope with. The main themes we talked about were an overwhelming experience of desolation and isolation. We talked about how it felt as though we had reached the 'bottom of the ladder' and that this gave us a profound feeling of hopelessness.

Initiatives for the mentally ill homeless

Most social or health work is based, above all, on the supposition that those who feel a need for help should come and ask for it. Only to a limited extent do social workers appear to take the initiative to go out onto the streets to make contact, and in such projects the emphasis is still clearly upon encouraging people to come and ask for help accompanied by the belief that if they don't ask, then they should be left alone. The following views are based on my experience with an 'on-the-street' outreach project with bag people in 2009. Despite the fact that it was a voluntary and poorly resourced project, we managed to make contact with 37 psychotic, 'contact-rejecting' homeless people which led to an improvement in living conditions for 13 of them (Kuhlman, 1994). At the same time, it was clear that more people could have derived similar benefits from this initiative had it been better resourced and had there been a greater pool of experience in targeting and resolving such problems. The views articulated below were also formed from talking to the homeless people themselves.

Firstly, a welfare society has a social responsibility to help these people and it must also be a basic demand - an ethical requirement - not to leave them to themselves. It is of course important that as far as possible the help that is provided avoids becoming an encroachment. On occasions, this is unavoidable, but under such circumstances, it must never develop into a routine pattern of intervention. Thus, it must never become customary to simply dispatch a professional with the sole aim of committing a mentally ill street dweller to a psychiatric hospital against his/her will and then leave the consequences to chance and to others. Any initiative ought to be based on a thorough knowledge of the individual and a personal evaluation of the individual's subsequent welfare (Wood, 1992). During the last couple of years, a specialist street-team has been operating in the two largest (and geographically very separate) cities of USA. These teams of professionals concentrate their efforts on establishing contact with street dwellers that have mental health problems whilst also attempting to develop activities directed toward homeless people with mental health problems who stay in shelters.

Campaign for mentally ill homelessness

Although the campaign is characterized by a certain degree of haphazardness in the early stages, ...