Who are the homeless and what kind of problems do they have? A review of the literature

Abstract

IntroductionThe publications about homeless persons and homelessness are very popular among scientists. Entering the keyword ‘homeless’ returns about 17 thousand hits in the PubMed search engine. What is so interesting about homelessness that so many researchers devote their time and resources to this topic?AimOur paper is an attempt to answer the question about that, and partially about the genesis of homelessness.Material and methodsThe PubMed and Scopus databases have been researched. We selected the articles related to the most common pathologies among the homeless.Results and discussionThe background of the phenomenon of homelessness is described in the context of the most commonly reported shared elements i.e. poverty, social exclusion, high mortality rates, male predominance, alcohol and drug dependence, intellectual deficits, depressive disorders and suicides. We described the differences resulting from geographical location and environmental factors. We are trying to elucidate the reasons for the discrepancies between individual investigators studying similar problems at different places and at different times.ConclusionsHomeless people are not a different species. They are a derivate of societies on the margins of which these people live. They are therefore different in the geographical sense, but in a given area they change with time similarly to the local population.