The Myth of Pervasive Mental Illness among the Homeless

This paper calls into question the double-edged thesis that the majority of the homeless are mentally ill and that the streets of urban America have consequently become the asylums of today. We present data from a triangulated field study of nearly 1,000 unattached homeless adults in Texas that contradict this stereotypic imagery. We also suggest that this root image is due to the medicalization of the problem of homelessness, a misplaced emphasis on the causal role of deinstitutionalization, the heightened visibility of homeless individuals who are mentally ill, and several conceptual and methodological shortcomings of previous attempts to assess the mental status of the homeless. We conclude by arguing that the most common face on the street is not that of the psychiatrically-impaired individual, but of one caught in a cycle of low-paying, dead-end jobs that fail to provide the means to get off and stay off the streets.