Alcohol and other drug problems among the homeless: Research, practice, and future directions
Abstract At least 50 percent of America's homeless people have significant current problems with alcohol and other drugs. These problems are important risk factors in the selection of the undomiciled from the larger population of extremely poor people. This paper reviews what is known about homeless people with alcohol and other drug problems; assesses the relationship between such individual problems and the larger phenomenon of homelessness; and describes selected aspects of projects funded through the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism/National Institute on Drug Abuse Demonstration Program for Homeless Persons with Alcohol and Other Drug Problems. It concludes with observations about future directions for research and practice.
Therapeutic Stations and the Chronically Treated Mentally Ill
Readmissions to mental hospitals are often cited as evidence of the failure of the contemporary mental health system. This essay proposes a different interpretation of readmissions. Building on fieldwork and participant observation methods, the authors argue that the "veteran" patient is less a victim of poor psychiatric care and misdirected reform than he is a citizen with few personal resources, using public services to cope with the exigencies of life. Lacking family, job, and income, the ex-patient incorporates the hospital and other "therapeutic stations" into a resource pool upon which he or she can call when the need arises. The essay also discusses the implications of these findings for assessments of the community mental health movement.
Hidden Protest: The Channeling of Female Innovation and Resistance
Throughout most of history, and still today, deviant behavior has been viewed as bizarre and irrational, as mindless and purposeless. Deviance occurs when people are propelled by dark and unintelligible forces; by the "boiling blood, furious bile, and mutinous liquors" recounted by Foucault; by the primitive and hypnotic force of Le Bon's mob; by the Parsonian socially induced "compulsion" to deviate. Now this conception of the essential nature of deviance is not demonstrated; it is assumed, and the assumption is the starting point from which most explanations of deviance follow. Accordingly, these explanations are preoccupied with identifying the stressful or disorganizing forces which propel men and women toward irrational behavior. The content of the behavior itself is