Homelessness Health In Canada

"Brings together leading and emerging researchers to advance understanding of the complex relationships between homelessness and health. Covering a wide range of topics from youth homelessness to end-of-life care, contributors outline policy and practice recommendations to respond to this public health crisis."--Back cover.

Mental health and homelessness in Canada.

Around the world and across a range of contexts, homelessness among older people is on the rise. In spite of growing media attention and new academic research on the issue, older people often remain unrecognized as a subpopulation in public policy, programs, and homeless strategies. As such, they occupy a paradoxical position of being hypervisible while remaining overlooked. Late-Life Homelessness is the first Canadian book to address this often neglected issue. Basing her analysis on a four-year ethnographic study of late-life homelessness in Montreal, Canada, Amanda Grenier uses a critical gerontological perspective to explore life at the intersection of aging and homelessness. She draws attention to disadvantage over time and how the condition of being unhoused disrupts a person’s ability to age in place, resulting in experiences of unequal aging. Weaving together findings from policy documents, stakeholder insights, and observations and interviews with older people, this book demonstrates how structures, organizational practices, and relationships related to homelessness and aging come to shape late life. Situated in the context of an aging population, rising inequality, and declining social commitments, Late-Life Homelessness stresses the moral imperative of responding justly to the needs of older people as a means of mitigating the unequal aging of unhoused elders.

Some say mental illness is the last great stigma remaining in our communities. This book is a collection of twenty articles written by researchers, scholars, practitioners of nursing, social work, and community health, and survivors of mental illness and homelessness. Each piece speaks to a specific aspect of the linkages among housing/homelessness, poverty, and mental illness.

A Complex Exile shows that the homelessness sector inadvertently reinforces the social exclusion of people who are homeless. Over 235,000 people couch-surf, stay in emergency shelters, or live on the street in Canada every year. However, the very policies, practices, and funding models that exist to house the homeless, promote social inclusion, and provide mental health care form a homelessness industrial complex. These practices emphasize personal responsibility and individualized responses that ultimately serve to subtly exclude people. This book goes beyond bio-medical and psychological perspectives on homelessness, mental illness, and addiction, to call for a transformation in how we respond to homelessness in Canada.

There have always been homeless people in the United States, but their plight has only recently stirred widespread public reaction and concern. Part of this new recognition stems from the problem's prevalence: the number of homeless individuals, while hard to pin down exactly, is rising. In light of this, Congress asked the Institute of Medicine to find out whether existing health care programs were ignoring the homeless or delivering care to them inefficiently. This book is the report prepared by a committee of experts who examined these problems through visits to city slums and impoverished rural areas, and through an analysis of papers written by leading scholars in the field.