HOMELESSNESS AS A LIFE-STYLE

For those homeless people who are rejecting traditional social service s, one may have to be able to treat their symptoms as secondary while looking beyond them for primary social patterns. This reveals a lifest yle devastated by disaffiliation and social distance. People who have been homeless for a long time can be shown to be suffering from a life style of homelessness or from ''homelessness-as-a-lifestyle.'' This is a condition, the components of which often include early life transie ncy, impulsiveness, clusters of unsolved problems, as well as a lack o f social and other supports. These lifestyle elements interact with on e another in perpetuating fashion, dragging the person along in an und ertow: one result of which is downward mobility. Four case studies dem onstrate examples of this social condition.