homeless

As the recession drags on, are we going to see the dead bodies of homeless people lying about in the streets (a vision one would have once expected to see only in a third-world country like India)? Even if you have a roof over your head, your socioeconomic status can affect your life expectancy.

It turns out that people who live in areas with lower household incomes are much more likely to die because of their personal and household characteristics and their community surroundings (and readers of this website know that there are genetic reasons for this).
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Will the time come when there are no more homeless people shivering in the snow? Anne Strieber has written about her friendship with a homeless lucky lady and about how she feels homeless herself, but some people REALLY ARE homeless. A sociologist wanted to find out why so many of these people refuse to go to shelters but actually seem to prefer living on the street.
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Something that government officials don’t like to admit is that most of the homeless people who ask for money on the street are mentally ill. Some of them are addicted to alcohol, drugs (or both), but since the mental hospitals have closed and the recession is still going strong, we are all seeing more and more of these people on the streets of our local communities.

Reducing the number of beds available in public psychiatric hospitals is associated with increased suicide rates and community-based mental health care is usually not enough to make a difference. A new study finds that for every bed lost for 100,000 people in the population, 45 additional suicides occur per year.
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