Word: homelessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Concern about the homeless usually waits for winter, when the cold weather claims its first victims and a frozen, abandoned death stirs guilt and some compassion...
Concern comes early this year. Last week a homeless woman walked into the Wall Street office of a currency-trading firm and shot the owner dead. In August she had been released from a mental hospital. Police say she was under the delusion that she was a partner in the company and had been wronged...
...army? Some say that only about a third of the homeless are mentally ill. Studies done in Boston and Philadelphia, where psychiatrists interviewed the homeless in shelters, yield estimates as high as 85%. Yet only a small proportion, perhaps a quarter, of the homeless are former mental patients. So emptying the hospitals, the skeptics say, is not the major cause of homelessness. This is a non sequitur. The social policy mandating that old patients be pushed out of psychiatric hospitals also mandates that new patients be kept out. True, today's young schizophrenic is less likely than yesterday's ever...
...composite of studies [of the homeless] indicates that 35% have schizophrenia and 10% significant clinical depression," writes Dr. Irwin Perr of the Rutgers Medical School in New Jersey. And "some 25% to 50% have alcohol-and drug-abuse problems." Which means that, to be conservative, a majority of the homeless dwell near either psychosis or stupor...
Partly because country life was thought to be healthier, the asylum has traditionally been located there. It need not be. Older urban hospitals, now being closed, could be turned into institutions to care for the homeless mentally ill. There is no need for warehousing. Smaller-scale urban or suburban clinics will do. The crucial feature of asylum is not isolation or size. It is control...