ABSTRACT
Health and homelessness are strongly inter-related. Clinical and demographic studies have long shown that poor health can be a contributing factor to homelessness, can be an effect of homelessness and can impede an exit from homelessness (see Hodgetts et al., 2007; Hwang, 2001; Institute of Medicine, 1988). Poor physical and mental health puts people at greater risk of becoming homeless and, once homeless, they are at increased risk of premature death, are more likely to experience a wide range of physical and mental illnesses and are more likely to be assaulted (Hodgetts et al., 2007; Hwang, 2001). However, beyond the empirical connection between health and homelessness, health geographers and other critical social scientists have documented the emergence and expansion of medicalized understandings of homelessness. As political interest in addressing the structural causes of homelessness has waned, individualized therapeutic interventions have become a central focus of efforts to address homelessness (Gowan, 2010; Lyon-Callo, 2000; Weinberg, 2008). For several decades now, therapeutic interventions have been commonly positioned as a fundamental cure for homelessness, rather than a topical treatment for the symptoms of structural phenomena, such as housing deprivation.
