Homelessness and PTSD

A formerly homeless woman named Lori Teresa Yearwood has an article in Slate touching on several concerns of mine, housing costs and psychiatry. Homelessness is sometimes blamed on the deinstitutionalization of mental patients, which is no doubt true to some degree. However, Ms. Yearwood argues that sometimes people are not homeless because they’re mentally ill, but “mentally ill” because they’re homeless: as a normal reaction to abnormal conditions, viz. such stresses of being homeless as having been assaulted, being sleep-deprived, and being otherwise insecure, people present in a way that seems like mental illness to those of us in more fortunate circumstances. They are then sometimes misdiagnosed and wrongly drugged by mental health professionals who misunderstand their real problems.

Ms. Yearwood also notes that wages for the lower tiers of the population have not kept up with increasing rents, which contributes to the problem of homelessness. I have had some things to say about this in the past; there was a then-famous and now obscure nineteenth century economist and reformer whose ideas I believe to be relevant to current problems.