Bums by Peter Bagge is a great comic e-book (it's short, just four pages) with some of the most all-around rational views on homelessness I've ever read. Includes a description of the Housing First approach (detail shown here). Cool artwork, too.

In Vancouver, BC the InSite safe injection site illustrates a major roadblock in dealing with homelessness: moral judgments and ideology obstructing science and clinical mental health care. A letter published in Open Medicine signed by 134 doctors, scientists, politicians, police members and community workers protests the federal government's reluctance to approve funding and demands a reasonable explanation. The evidence base is clear: InSite prevents deaths, the spread of disease, reduces crime, and leads addicts to treatment. Meanwhile, the government stalls on approving its continued success [seemingly] due to political interference from pigheaded religious types and stupid war-on-drugs rhetoric seeping in from America. A quote from the letter:

Policy-makers may legitimately decide on ethical, moral, political, or economic grounds to severely restrict or even prohibit the use of an intervention, such as Vancouver's supervised injection site, that careful scientific inquiry has shown to have significant health benefits. In these situations, however, policy-makers must provide cogent reasons for their decision and make the basis for their actions explicit and transparent. Such decisions must not be justified by resorting to deceptive claims that cast doubt on the effectiveness of the intervention, or that raise unsupported fears of harmful side effects.

At the same time, physicians, scientists, and public health professionals must be willing to speak out in the public arena when the accumulated body of research evidence clearly supports a health intervention that faces resistance because of entrenched beliefs. As stated in a declaration by Scientists and Engineers for America, a grassroots organization that counts 15 Nobel laureates among its board of advisors, "[t]he principal role of the science and technology community is to advance human understanding. But there are times when this is not enough. Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation's leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, [or] put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths."

Vancouver isn't even close to adopting a Housing First approach. BC is continuing the deinstitutionalization of severely mentally ill people with few community supports and no new housing. Homelessness often leads to addiction (and vice versa), not to mention frequent acute care hospitalization. Mental disorders accounted for 52% of admissions for homeless people in 2005-6. (For people with homes the most common reason for hospitalization, at 13%, was childbirth and pregnancy.)

Y'all thought we had a health care utopia in Canada?

[x-posted and slightly rewritten at World of Psychology]
[sorry this isn't funny ha-ha like most Omni Brain stuff; mental health issues seldom are]