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.
Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness
The most accurate and comprehensive picture of homelessness to date, this study offers a powerful explanation of its causes, proposes short- and long-term solutions, and documents the striking contrasts between the homeless of the 1950s and 1960s and the contemporary homeless population, which is younger and contains more women, children, and blacks.
"What shall we do with the inebriate?" Asylum treatment and the disease concept of alcoholism in the late nineteenth century.
During the late nineteenth century a number of physicians, sometimes called inebriety specialists, combined a narrowly physicalistic disease concept of alcoholism with a high regard for the curative power of asylum treatment to advocate the development of specialized asylums for the treatment of alcoholism. Central to the idea of such an inebriate asylum was the belief that the power to detain the alcoholic was necessary to cure his disease. This article considers why inebriety specialists held this belief as well as why others opposed it. It also describes alternative approaches to alcoholism and the fate of efforts, during this period, to treat the alcoholic by confining him.