Post by Admin on Nov 23, 2020 21:42:58 GMT
“One thing is sure: Chronic, severe mental illness plays a vital role in the public’s understanding—or misunderstanding—of homelessness. Homelessness did rise with the wave of deinstitutionalization of people with mental illness that began in the late 1960s. This led to the widespread perception that people who live on the streets are doing so because of a serious, preexisting mental illness that precludes them from being able to be employed or house themselves.
But the perception is inaccurate. The true cause of the surge in homelessness, according to Martha R. Burt, author of Over The Edge and a social researcher at the Urban Institute, is the housing crisis in this country, which also began in the 1960s with the elimination of inexpensive urban housing. That gave people, including those who were deinstitutionalized, no other option but to live on the streets. This was accompanied by the dissolution of social and economic structures that had sustained low-income people, says Burt, who has been studying the homeless for more than 40 years.”
Trauma in Plain Sight
Among homeless people, PTSD is widespread and widely overlooked.
slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/homeless-life-ptsd-overlooked.html
The psychiatrist in the windowless room on the second floor of the rehabilitation center in Utah didn’t say much. He asked a handful of questions, scribbled a few notes on a piece of paper and then, Millie Davidson says, he told her that she needed to take antipsychotics. Given the severity of her diagnosis, she should also sign up for permanent disability benefits, she remembers him saying.
Davidson declined the offer even when she saw the doctor’s paperwork, detailing her all-you-can-eat buffet of serious mental health diagnoses, which included schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder.
“Deep down, I thought, ‘That couldn’t possibly be me,’ ” says Davidson, who had just emerged from two years of living on the streets. “But I was weak from everything I had gone through and I was just so lost that I also thought, ‘Maybe that could be me.’ If a doctor was telling me this, then maybe he was right.”
Turns out he was wrong. Eight years later, in the spring of 2019, in the midst of healing from her collapse into homelessness and the substance abuse that she fell into during that time, Davidson received a drastically different mental health assessment. This one was given by a team of university researchers and doctors, who concluded that Davidson—now a full-time youth leader at an all-girl’s school, a homeowner, and a college student slated to earn her bachelor’s degree this year—has post-traumatic stress disorder. Not schizoaffective disorder and not bipolar disorder.
“In short,” the diagnosis stated, “Ms. Davidson presented a psychological profile that matches her life story.”
That life story, like those of many homeless people, included an extreme amount of trauma. But the role of trauma and the resulting mental health diagnosis of PTSD is widely ignored in the homeless population, mental health experts say. The result is a debilitating, even life-threatening situations in which homeless people experience or witness traumatic events, yet the effects of those experiences go unacknowledged, undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed.
“Chronic homelessness is chronic exposure to stress and chronic exposure to trauma that could lead to PTSD,” G. Robert “Bobby” Watts, chief executive officer of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council in Nashville, Tennessee, told me. “But not all organizations are trauma-informed enough to be able to make the accurate diagnosis.”
As a consequence, post-traumatic stress is often overlooked or misdiagnosed as some other psychiatric condition. The people to whom this happens are re-traumatized to such an extent, Watts said, “that the trauma that already existed is exacerbated.”
Exacerbated trauma can look like a lot of things. In the realm of PTSD, it can look like going into “flight,” “fright,” or “freeze” mode. This brings up a whole other layer of causation, one in which the question naturally arises: Can untreated PTSD be so detrimental that it renders a homeless person unable to gather their wits to the point where they can escape homelessness?
As a formerly homeless woman who “froze” for nearly two years, my answer is a resounding “yes.”
There are no national statistics on the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among homeless people. Even the estimates of how many people suffer from the disorder in mainstream America vary greatly—from 5 million to 24 million.
But the perception is inaccurate. The true cause of the surge in homelessness, according to Martha R. Burt, author of Over The Edge and a social researcher at the Urban Institute, is the housing crisis in this country, which also began in the 1960s with the elimination of inexpensive urban housing. That gave people, including those who were deinstitutionalized, no other option but to live on the streets. This was accompanied by the dissolution of social and economic structures that had sustained low-income people, says Burt, who has been studying the homeless for more than 40 years.”
Trauma in Plain Sight
Among homeless people, PTSD is widespread and widely overlooked.
slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/homeless-life-ptsd-overlooked.html
The psychiatrist in the windowless room on the second floor of the rehabilitation center in Utah didn’t say much. He asked a handful of questions, scribbled a few notes on a piece of paper and then, Millie Davidson says, he told her that she needed to take antipsychotics. Given the severity of her diagnosis, she should also sign up for permanent disability benefits, she remembers him saying.
Davidson declined the offer even when she saw the doctor’s paperwork, detailing her all-you-can-eat buffet of serious mental health diagnoses, which included schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder.
“Deep down, I thought, ‘That couldn’t possibly be me,’ ” says Davidson, who had just emerged from two years of living on the streets. “But I was weak from everything I had gone through and I was just so lost that I also thought, ‘Maybe that could be me.’ If a doctor was telling me this, then maybe he was right.”
Turns out he was wrong. Eight years later, in the spring of 2019, in the midst of healing from her collapse into homelessness and the substance abuse that she fell into during that time, Davidson received a drastically different mental health assessment. This one was given by a team of university researchers and doctors, who concluded that Davidson—now a full-time youth leader at an all-girl’s school, a homeowner, and a college student slated to earn her bachelor’s degree this year—has post-traumatic stress disorder. Not schizoaffective disorder and not bipolar disorder.
“In short,” the diagnosis stated, “Ms. Davidson presented a psychological profile that matches her life story.”
That life story, like those of many homeless people, included an extreme amount of trauma. But the role of trauma and the resulting mental health diagnosis of PTSD is widely ignored in the homeless population, mental health experts say. The result is a debilitating, even life-threatening situations in which homeless people experience or witness traumatic events, yet the effects of those experiences go unacknowledged, undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed.
“Chronic homelessness is chronic exposure to stress and chronic exposure to trauma that could lead to PTSD,” G. Robert “Bobby” Watts, chief executive officer of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council in Nashville, Tennessee, told me. “But not all organizations are trauma-informed enough to be able to make the accurate diagnosis.”
As a consequence, post-traumatic stress is often overlooked or misdiagnosed as some other psychiatric condition. The people to whom this happens are re-traumatized to such an extent, Watts said, “that the trauma that already existed is exacerbated.”
Exacerbated trauma can look like a lot of things. In the realm of PTSD, it can look like going into “flight,” “fright,” or “freeze” mode. This brings up a whole other layer of causation, one in which the question naturally arises: Can untreated PTSD be so detrimental that it renders a homeless person unable to gather their wits to the point where they can escape homelessness?
As a formerly homeless woman who “froze” for nearly two years, my answer is a resounding “yes.”
There are no national statistics on the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among homeless people. Even the estimates of how many people suffer from the disorder in mainstream America vary greatly—from 5 million to 24 million.