Some useful background information
Homelessness is not just a housing problem: it has impacts on health, educational achievement and employment opportunities.
The causes of homelessness are many and varied and each homeless person and household will have become homeless due to their own unique circumstances:
- Loss of income, including unemployment - leading to people falling behind with their rent or mortgage repayments
- Relationship breakdown, domestic violence, problems with a landlord, family disputes, or friends and relatives no longer being able to provide accommodation.
- Mental health or substance misuse problems may also have an impact.
- Lack of available affordable housing - combined with adverse economic and social circumstances. This is the most common route to becoming homeless (Shelter 2008)
“Street homelessness” includes vulnerable people who may have somewhere basic to sleep at night, but who can be on the streets during the day. It includes people therefore who stay in derelict buildings and squats. It includes people sleeping outside of city centres and those who stay in hostels. It also includes street based sex workers who are vulnerable and homeless, but not visibly sleeping on the street. Street homelessness includes higher numbers of homeless people from BME groups and women.
Some street homelessness is caused simply by lack of suitable accommodation. People who remain street homeless for long periods though or who become homeless repeatedly, will usually have at least one need or health problem in addition to their homelessness. Often they have more than one; this is sometimes referred to as multiple needs. These additional needs can help cause continued homelessness and in turn can themselves be made worse by continued homelessness.
The main three of these needs are:
- Mental health
- Problem drug and alcohol use
- Offending behaviour
Mental Health
Good-quality, affordable, safe housing is essential to our wellbeing. The housing charity Shelter has found links between overcrowded family housing and depression, anxiety, sleep problems and strained relationships.
The relationship between housing and mental health is complex. Poor housing can contribute to mental ill health, while mental ill health can make it more difficult for people to find and maintain good-quality accommodation.
Studies revealed the following issues:
- People with mental health problems are under-represented in owner-occupied accommodation, which is generally seen as the most socially valued and secure housing in the UK today.
- Compared with the general population, people with mental health problems are twice as likely to be unhappy with their housing and four times as likely to say that it makes their health worse.
- Mental ill health is frequently cited as a reason for tenancy breakdown.
- Housing problems are frequently cited as a reason for a person being admitted or re-admitted to in-patient mental health care.
Housing sector staff (for example, Local Authority Homeless Persons Units) often lack awareness of mental health issues. Equally, some mental health support staff would benefit from greater awareness of housing issues. This may also be compounded by the fact that poor housing and homelessness are often linked to other forms of social exclusion, such as poverty.
Tourette Syndrome (TS) is named after Dr. George Gilles de la Tourette, the French neurologist who first reported TS in medical literature in 1885. It is a recognised medical condition, which is often inherited, but we don't yet understand the cause. There are treatments, but there is no cure as with many chronic medical conditions.
The symptoms of TS are tics, repeated movements and sounds. It is important to understand that these are chronic and involuntary. Someone with TS may be able to suppress them for a period but eventually they have to let the tics out. Symptoms include uttering words or phrases out of context, coprolalia (saying socially unacceptable words), and echolalia (repeating a sound, word, or phrase just heard). Coprolalia (involuntary bad language) only affects about 10% of people with TS.
www.tsa.org.uk
Addiction
First of all, a definition of what addiction is not. It's nothing to do with either lack of willpower or intelligence; people with addiction problems often have above-average rations of both. For many, their habit started as a way of coping with unbearable feelings they couldn't deal with in any other way. Through a mixture, perhaps, of life experiences, social pressures and genetic inheritance, they have lost control over their behaviour, their drinking or their drug-taking, and suffer cravings or withdrawal symptoms if they go without.
Unfortunately, addiction tends to get worse and worse. Often, people don't recognise they have a problem for a long time, so they don't ask for the help they need. If this happens, addiction may take a terrible toll on the quality of life at home, school or work, and to relationships; at worst, it could even be fatal.
Heroin is a natural opiate made from morphine (opiates dull pain). Morphine is extracted from the opium poppy. Like many drugs made from opium, including synthetic opioids (e.g. methadone) heroin is a very strong painkiller.
Slang: Street names for drugs can vary around the country. Brown, skag, H, horse, gear, smack.
Methadone is one of a number of synthetic opiates (also called opioids) that are manufactured for medical use and have similar effects to heroin. Methadone and Subutex (Buprenorphine) are used as opiate substitutes for heroin in the treatment of heroin addiction.
Slang: Street names for drugs can vary around the country. Mixture, meth, linctus, physeptone.
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