About Schizophrenia & Homelessness

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is John Bosworth. I'm a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in St. Petersburg, Florida. I would like to talk about schizophrenia and homelessness. Homelessness among schizophrenics, psychotic population or any of those with severe mental illness presents a really really challenging problem for not only for mental health professionals and medical professionals but for the community in general. Most mental health providers at some point in their career or their training tend to treat people with schizophrenia or other major major mental illness. What we are really looking at, at the risk of becoming homeless in that population because of family factors because of psychosocial factors is on average about 10 times greater than the average person becoming homeless and some of those reasons are family members don't know what to do and are fed up and don't know how to really treat or how to respond to somebody with a mental illness. Somebody with schizophrenia or other mental illnesses may go into an institution, lose touch with family members or end up on the streets and what we usually see is a period of hospitalizations with people with schizophrenia but based on records and based on my clinical observations most people that become homeless because of severe mental illness face not only serious psychological trauma and stress of being homeless with not having a place to live but they face a lot of physical threats and physical obstacles as well and in our area here in St. Petersburg or in some other areas of Florida cold may not be too big of a problem except for a couple weeks out of the year but in other major cities where there is a homeless problem or a large homeless population extreme temperatures can be seriously life threatening. Also infectious disease presents a problem for schizophrenics or for people with other severe mental disorders that might come in contact with an infectious disease on the street or through prostitution or illegal drug use and there is also violence and there is also nutrition related problems and nutrition related problems present a serious risk and I have worked with a couple individual cases that I have worked with, people were known to eat out of dumpsters or out of garbage cans and really had no idea when they weren't on their medication and were really in more of a downward spiral and had no idea that that was even a problem so these are some of the adverse conditions that people with schizophrenia and severe mental health problems can undergo. My name is John Bosworth and I am talking about schizophrenia and homelessness."