The Link Between Psychotic Disorders and Homelessness

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 Psychotic disorders are a type of mental illness that cause people to lose touch with reality, and experience symptoms like hallucinations, paranoia, and incoherent speech. Disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar, and full on psychosis fall into this category. Treatment usually looks like the life-long use of antipsychotic medications from a psychiatrist. A meta-analysis looking at psychotic disorder prevalence among homeless populations around the globe found shocking results. According to their analysis, 21% of the homeless population met the criteria for psychosis, and 10% met the criteria for schizophrenia, which is over 10X higher than prevalence in the housed population (Ayano, 2019).     

    This presents a possible lack of options and success in the treatment of psychotic disorder that must be brought to attention. Solutions to disproportionate treatment failures in the case of these types of disorders means that both legislature and the psychology community need to find solutions. Those who experience episodes in schizophrenia, bipolar, or those in psychosis are not only unable to make rational decisions, but often are unable to communicate even simple things, making the barriers to seeking help extremely difficult. Of course, they are also at risk for participating in risky or self harming behavior including drug use, creating another barrier to becoming housed. 


Citations:


Ayano G, Tesfaw G, Shumet S. The prevalence of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders among homeless people: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Psychiatry. 2019 Nov 27;19(1):370. doi: 10.1186/s12888-019-2361-7. PMID: 31775786; PMCID: PMC6880407.

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