ABSTRACT
An extreme case? Not at all. According to estimates, roughly half of New York City’s 36,000 homeless were thought to be mentally disabled in the early 1980s.2
A total of 25,000 chronically mentally ill New Yorkers were thought to be living on the street, in missions, public shelters, flophouses and cheap hotels.3 Of 1,235 men sleeping at a public shelter on New York’s Bowery on a night in 1976, half showed signs of obvious mental illness, excluding alcoholism; many of these men were former state hospital residents. At the Women’s Shelter in New York City more than three-quarters of the women admitted in 1971 were suffering from a psychosis.4 The degree of mental disturbance amongst such down and out New Yorkers was by no means slight. Mental health professionals who interviewed 100 long-time residents at the same Men’s Shelter on the Bowery in 1965 found 50 per cent of the men to be psychotic and diagnosed 36 per cent of the whole group as suffering from schizophrenia. They compared this group of 100 Bowery men with a large sample of recently admitted inpatients at five local psychiatric hospitals. Startlingly enough, the residents of the Men’s Shelter were found to be more disturbed than the inpatients according to several measures in a standardized evaluation proeedure.5
