Anyone working in the Emergency Department knows that homelessness and psychiatric disorders go hand-in-hand – and that also goes psychiatric disorders and substance abuse. This study confirms what we already know about the prevalence of these issues in the homeless population.
The most interesting number I read out of it was that the life expectancy of a homeless male aged 15-24 years was 38.7, and 47.4 for similarly aged homeless females – compared to life expectancies of 60.3 and 64.8 in their general population. It makes me wonder how much of that life expectancy difference is just the homelessness, or whether it’s the psychiatric and substance abuse disorders – I would probably say most of that difference is made up with the substance abuse.
“Psychiatric disorders and mortality among people in homeless shelters in Denmark: a nationwide register-based cohort study.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21676456