I choose homelessness for my topic because it is something that even I had to experience at one point in my life. The federal government defines homelessness as an individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence; and an individual who has a primary nighttime residence that is supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations (Martin M, 2007). This definition is for the most part excluding the numerous homeless individual that refuse to live in the shelter systems and take their refuge on the streets. In the 16 and 1700’s many families suffered homelessness due to the war. Children were left without responsible parents and society seemed to disregard what they passed by in the streets.
Millions of people lost their jobs during these tragic times, and left their homes in pursuit of securing work, but most fell short. As a result, many found themselves homeless and struggling for survival. Tom Kromer, who was twenty-three years old at the time, published a book in 1935 titled “Waiting for Nothing”, wherein he gave descriptive accounts of the cruel conditions
Vulnerable populations include the working poor, racial and ethnic minorities, the uninsured, children, the elderly, the homeless, those chronic health conditions, including HIV/AIDS, not to mention severe mental illness. It may also include rural residents, who often encounter barriers to accessing healthcare services. The vulnerability of these individuals is enhanced by race, ethnicity, age, sex, and factors such as income, lack of insurance coverage. Their health and healthcare problems overlap with social factors, including inadequate housing, poverty, and poor education. According to a Department of Justice report, prisoners enter the system and bring with them “infectious diseases from underprivileged home environments that are breeding grounds for HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and tuberculosis, the three most prevalent communicable diseases in America’s prisons today.” There is a misunderstanding that when a person commits a crime and goes to prison, he or she surrenders all rights.
Chapter 5 of the James and Gilliland text describes a crisis intervention team (CIT) approach to dealing with crises of the mentally ill, many of whom are homeless or have entered unstable living situations since the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. The act brought changes that released many mentally ill people back into the community. Analyze the tools and resources that a CIT approach could offer in your own community if you were developing these resources. Analyze the benefits and potential obstacles of this approach if you were the ambassador to advocate locally for the concept. Determining the amount of homeless individuals in any given area can be a difficult task and statistics very dependent on the source.
The problem for the population of women is the lack of intervention and treatment in the urban and rural community. There are multiple reasons for post-partum depression in women in rural and urban communities that vary from socioeconomics, anxiety, and lack of social support. Post-partum depression can also have effects on the children such as malnutrition, illness, developmental delay, poor growth, and poor mother-infant attachment. There have been many post-partum depression screenings and surveys done worldwide and most of the population is Caucasian, married women of high socioeconomic status, however, there is evidence to suggest that in urban and rural communities worldwide there is not enough intervention and treatment. “In a Chinese study, rural women had more depressive disorders as well as a group of women in a rural part in Mexico experienced higher rates of depressive disorders in women.” (Villegas, 2011) Many times rural residents are associated with low-income, low levels of education, lack of insurance, and poor quality of life which can contribute to the onset of psychiatric illness.
Throughout the last few decades nationalizing of health care has been a very controversial topic. Health care has been a problem among Americans for many years. Today many Americans have little or no health insurance. Many Americans do not get the proper medical treatment. Health care is hard for people to get the proper coverage due to high prices, pre-existing conditions, or debt problems.
Substance abuse, mental illness, and poor health are just a handful of problems encountered by many individuals in the homeless population. The causes of these issues can be determined using critical thinking. Critical thinking is defined as “the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion” (dictionary.com, 2011). An individual seeking to understand the causes of the issues mentioned would make an inference based on an assumption about the issue. For instance, many homeless individuals struggle with substance abuse.
The author describes experiences with vulnerable populations in her own life. Vulnerable Population Recent periodical discussing a vulnerable population The manuscript by Sanders, Schneiderman, Loken, Lankenau, and Bloom (2009) identifies gang youth as a vulnerable population. Sanders et al. (2009) discusses risk factors of being in a gang, examples of which are deprived socioeconomic backgrounds, living in communities with a long history of drug sales, crime, and gang activity. This gang youth are considered vulnerable as are 60 times more likely to be killed than the rest of the population.
A victim of rape (primary victimisation), for example, may be subjected to victim blaming and ostracism as the result of the attack; those who become disabled (primary victimisation) may be subjected to non-accommodation, medicalization, and segregation; and those who develop mental disorder (primary victimisation) may be subject to institutionalisation, that in each case may be far more victimising to these individuals and limiting of their life opportunity than the primary victimising stigmatic condition itself, and are thus called secondary victimisation. The disregards of victims’ needs following a crime against them can sometimes be so traumatic that it is called the “second rape” (in the case of rape) or “second assault”. Victims will feel let down and isolated by the criminal justice body, the medical body and any other institution that is meant to help them, but instead causes the victim in certain cases to start believing that it was in fact their fault or that they had a hand in causing the crime. During the court process, secondary victimisation takes place at various levels. Examples of this are where the victim is not afforded private waiting or report-taking facilities.
That doesn't include the other millions of people who are infected with AIDS and other incurable diseases. An overwhelming amount of people with mental and psychosocial disabilities are living in poverty, poor physical health, and are impacted by human rights violations. Mental health issues cannot be considered in isolation from other areas of development, such as education, employment, emergency responses and human rights capacity building. People with mental and psychosocial disabilities is an open to attack group as a result of the way they are treated by society. They are subjected to a sign of social unacceptability and discrimination on a daily basis, and they experience extremely high rates of physical and sexual victimization.