More than passing strange: homelessness and mental illness in New York City

Abstract

The presence of psychiatric disturbance is a much‐noted feature of the new urban homelessness in the United States. An impaired capacity model of homelessness—which assumes that the disorder is responsible for the displacement—is a common inference. Drawing upon ethnographic research in New York and recent epidemiological literature, this article criticizes such an approach on empirical, methodological, and historical grounds. It argues instead that individual failures to secure stable housing have their roots in larger developments in housing, employment, household composition, and government assistance programs. It is the circumstances under which psychiatric disability is converted into social dispossession—and not “deviance” per se—that need to be examined. [homelessness, mental illness, urban poverty]