Housing patterns of homeless mentally ill persons receiving assertive treatment services.

Abstract

Although the results are preliminary, most of the homeless mentally ill patients who agreed to participate in this study and were randomly assigned to the assertive community treatment team successfully moved off the street. However, this change did not imply stability; most patients had multiple moves from one type of shelter to another. It will be important to assess if the number of moves diminishes as more patients obtain shelter that can become permanent. While loss of shelter sometimes seemed motivated by patient preference, the majority of housing losses were a result of problems amenable to clinical treatment such as psychiatnic relapse and addiction. This finding suggests that homelessness can be reduced by appropriate clinical interventions if housing is available. That patients referred to the team from hospitals rather than from the street had more favorable outcomes is noteworthy. It is possible that hospitalization stabilized these patients and facilitated their engagement in treatment. It i...