“I Need Help and I Know I Need Help. Why Won’t Nobody Listen to Me?”

Abstract

In the present study, we draw on interviews conducted with 79 homeless women in Detroit and Chicago to reveal the extent to which women in our sample have experienced multiple forms of trauma and other significant stressors over their life course, events that we show have had serious negative effects on their mental and emotional well-being. We then look at their ability to access counseling services and consider barriers to service use. For those women who have utilized counseling services, we examine their reported satisfaction with the services accessed and identify certain deficiencies. Based on our findings, we conclude that it could reasonably be argued that the ‘pathological homeless woman’ is a construct tied to women’s experiences with a health care system that frequently fails them.