Academic literature on the topic 'People in homelessness'

This thesis explores the experiences of homeless young people with a particular focus on the process of making the journey out of homelessness. It consists of a literature review, a research paper and a critical appraisal. The literature review comprises a narrative approach exploring the meaning of ‘home’ in relation to the lives of homeless young people. It explores, synthesises and critically appraises a range of inter-disciplinary research to consider the physical, psychological and social dimensions to this concept. The review then considers the clinical implications of these ideas for supporting homeless young people to regain a sense of ‘home’ in their lives. The research paper explores the experiences of seven young people making the journey out of homelessness. The research, developed in collaboration with a research advisory group of young people, adopted a narrative methodology to explore participants’ stories. The findings are presented as a ‘shared story’ containing five chapters. The findings illustrate the psychological and social mediators which impact on young people’s experiences of navigating the journey out of homelessness. The contributions of these narratives are discussed in relation to guiding interventions to address the psychological wellbeing of homeless young people. Finally, the critical appraisal presents my reflections on the research journey and is divided into five chapters. The first chapter details my hopes and motivations when embarking on the research project. The second chapter reflects upon the process of how I conceptualised and planned the project, including the challenges I faced in attempting to do this this. The third chapter provides an account of my experience of undertaking the research project. Finally, the fourth chapter summarises my reflections about the future dissemination of the research and how my experiences conducting this research have impacted on my personal and professional development.

The population of people experiencing homelessness has decreased less than 15% in the last ten years, but issues like mental illness and substance use are rising. There are many misconceptions about race, gender, location and age of people experiencing homelessness. Music therapy research about the homeless population is minimal and often focused on just one setting or treatment location. The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between music therapists and people experiencing homelessness. A survey of 365 music therapists in the United States revealed just under half of working clinicians provide services to people experiencing homelessness. Results from the survey revealed the most common settings where music therapists provided service to people experiencing homelessness were mental health, medical, and school systems. Additionally, the results discussed people experiencing homelessness’ demographic differences in clinician’s experiences versus annual reports. Results are not to be generalized but to be used as a tool to better understand people experiencing homelessness.

Background: A link between youth homelessness and mental illness is recognised (Bines, 1994; Craig & Hodson, 1998; Kamieniecki, 2001; Whitbeck, Johnson, Hoyt, Cauce, 2004). However, very little empirically robust research has examined the role mental health plays in the lives of young homeless people, particularly in the United Kingdom. In the UK, approximately 80,000 young people are known to experience homelessness each year. The actual figure is likely to be far larger as it does not take into account those young people who are ‘hidden homeless’ (DePaul UK, 2013). Young people with experiences of homelessness represent a highly vulnerable group in terms of their mental health (Hodgson, Shelton, van den Bree & Los, 2013). This thesis aimed to explore the relationship between psychopathology and youth homelessness and presents the findings of a prospective longitudinal study comprising of three interview stages over the course of two years. The design aims to address the gaps in our knowledge about these two phenomena. The thesis begins by providing an introduction to the area of youth homelessness in the UK (Chapter 1). The relationship between mental illness and homelessness is explored by drawing on a number of psychological theories including family systems, attachment, diathesis stress and the social support stress buffering hypothesis. This is followed by a systematic literature review examining the prevalence of mental health issues within this population and exploring the link between the two phenomena (Chapter 2). The review reveals high rates of psychopathology among young homeless people and identifies a possible reciprocal relationship between homelessness and mental illness. Chapter 3 provides a description of the research method and questionnaires. The longitudinal design used in this project involved three waves of data collection using a pack of questionnaires that explored a range of housing situations, family background, maltreatment, 2 criminality, self-control, loneliness and self-mastery. The interviews also included a full neuropsychiatric assessment in order to assess presence or absence of mental illness. In Chapter 4 a detailed description of the 121 participants recruited for the study revealed a sample representative of the youth homeless population as a whole. The sample had high levels of mental health problems (88%) and had a number of other areas of vulnerability including high rates of comorbidity, past abuse experiences, heavy use of drugs and alcohol, problematic family relationships and premature exits from education. Chapter 5 involved the analysis of the relationship between current disorder and future access to health and mental health services. The results revealed that while young homeless people had a particularly high rate of disorder they also had relatively low levels of access to appropriate services at follow up. However, access to emergency medical care was high. Some forms of disorder, such as depression, were particularly predictive of future health care use whereas other disorders including substance dependence were not. Cluster analysis using differing lifetime mental health conditions was conducted in Chapter 6 in order to identify subgroups of young people with experiences of homelessness. The subgroups derived from this analysis were used to examine differences in past, current and future experiences. Identification of three groups enabled prediction of future outcomes measured at follow up including differences in levels of observed loneliness and self-mastery, as well as level of suicide risk. The final analysis in Chapter 7 was concerned with change in mental health status over the course of the longitudinal study. A fine grained analysis of different characteristics and experiences was conducted, with the aim of assessing the differences between young people whose mental health improved, worsened or remained stable. The research reported in this chapter and the findings of the cluster analysis was then synthesised to further validate the 3 subgroups. This revealed relationships between poor past mental health and future mental health problems. The implications of the findings are discussed in Chapter 8 in terms of psychological theory, intervention work and current government policy relating to youth homelessness. Service providers need to be aware of the prevalence and variation of mental illness among the young people they support. Mental health offers a way of grouping young homeless people in order to tailor support that improves outcomes. Interventions need to be adapted and made accessible, collaborative work should be encouraged enabling support that accounts for heterogeneity in this population.

This PhD study focuses on understanding formerly homeless people’s attitudes to self, their home and their status in the housing system. The study was based on the analysis of twenty-eight narrative interviews with people who had experienced homelessness and who were, at the time of the interview, living in supported housing in a city in the South East of England. The decade 2000-2010, which provides the policy context for the research, was seen as a period of positive developments in homelessness research. In the current study and by using a combined narrative and thematic research approach, I place the single homeless people’s conceptualisations of identity into the Third Space (Shilling 1999, Burkitt 2008) presentation of flexible individualities, but which, despite the challenges and pressures experienced, maintain a strong sense of the core of the self that makes them unique. My approach to the homeless people’s identity formation accepts the possibility of a decentralisation of identities in contemporary societies; however, I maintain that there are parts of own identity which persist in individuals’ definitions of self and ultimately help ground the homeless individual. I acquiesce that identities can go through changes, imposed by personal circumstances and social context, and that these changes can lead to variations in the elements which retain value for the individual. However, despite all these changes, the homeless interviewees continued to refer to their self as easily recognised – retaining the same main qualities which belonged to the self before the homelessness experience. It was this strength of self that the interviewees ultimately wanted to transmit to the interviewer and it is this strength of self which places their conceptualisations of identity in the ‘Third Space’ approach. The study was placed at a crossroads for homelessness policies which had passed through a series of changes through two different governments: New Labour and the Coalition Government. As well as highlighting areas that required improvement, the study showed that a holistic perspective towards the homeless person, taking into account their experiences before, after and during the homelessness event and acknowledging the value of training and unpaid employment, could lead to policy and practice which is closer to individuals’ perceived identities and routes out of homelessness.

Recent research has suggested that mental health problems are over-represented in the homeless population. Currently mental health services are under-utilised by this group in proportion to need. It is often assumed that psychological intervention is unlikely to be helpful with a client group where basic needs are often not met. The Transtheoretical Model of Change is used as a framework to describe the complex, dynamic processes that are likely to impact on a homeless person with mental health problems' ability to seek help for their mental health difficulties. This model is also applied to services. The empirical evidence for Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as a help or hindrance to help-seeking behaviour is examined. This study asked homeless people to identify their own needs and explored current working practices of the few clinical psychologists who work with them directly. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to explore the role for clinical psychology for homeless people. A pilot study was conducted. In the main study, nine men from two day centres/night shelters (one rural and one inner city) were recruited opportunistically. Five clinical psychologists working within the homelessness field were recruited. Psychopathology of the homeless participants was measured using the GHQ-12 and BPRS. Within a user-designed approach a semi-structured interview was developed for the main study from the pilot study.

‘Home’ is widely used to describe a positive experience of a dwelling place (shelter). It is about a positive emotional connection to a dwelling place, feeling at ‘home’ in a dwelling place, where both physiological and psychological needs can be fulfilled. This portrayal of ‘home’, however, is not always how a dwelling place is experienced. A dwelling place can be a negative environment, i.e. ‘not-home’, or there may be no emotional attachment or investment in a dwelling place at all. Both circumstances receive little attention in the literature. This research explores the realities of ‘home’ by delving into the ‘home’ lives of seventeen individuals who had experienced a range of different housing situations, including recent homelessness, moving to a (resettlement) sole tenancy and then moving on from that tenancy. Participants were asked to recall their housing histories, from their first housing memory as a child up to the time of interviewing. For each housing episode, they were asked to describe the circumstances of their life at the time, for example relationships, employment and education. They were also asked to reflect on their housing experiences. Similarities and differences of experience are explored according to gender and type of housing situation. This research tells the story of lives characterised by housing and social instability, often triggered by a significant change in social context in childhood. As such, the fulfilment of both physiological and psychological needs was often constrained, and experiences of a dwelling place were more likely to be negative rather than positive, although ‘home’ could be found in the most challenging of circumstances, and often in the most unlikely of places. The participants’ constructions of ‘home’ and ‘not-home’ were largely focused on a singular feature, unlike the broader social constructions of ‘home’. ‘Not-home’ was characterised by physical insecurity, whereas ‘home’ was characterised by emotional security, with many characteristics mirroring human needs, of which ‘positive relationships’ was the most common feature. Many participants, however, had limited experience of, and/or struggled to forge and maintain, ‘positive relationships’, they lacked ‘social capital’, which meant having to navigate through a life of instability pretty much alone. As such, this research proposes a new narrative of ‘relationship poverty’, in which a lack of ‘positive relationships’ hinders the fulfilment of needs, and therefore the possibility of feeling at ‘home’ in any dwelling place.