Homelessness, Mental Illness and the State: An Endless Crisis of Suffering and Exclusion

Surprisingly little in academic or policy literature attempts to explain why homeless mentally ill people are chronically excluded from the benefits of the modern welfare or neo-liberal state. Such physical and legal exclusion causes untold suffering that defies the promises of modernity. This book offers original inter-disciplinary insights into why and how this problem persists as well as what could be done to solve it. Based on an Australian case study, exclusion is analyzed in the contexts of modernity, its legacy of ?wasted lives?, institutionalization and de-institutionalization and neo-liberal outsourcing. Inclusion, it advocates, could be secured through housing governance that reflects a whole-of-Person, whole-of-Government and whole-of- Sector ethic of care and human rights. Homelessness, Mental Illness and the State is essential reading for all inter-disciplinary scholars, policy-makers and practitioners in law, mental health, social work, criminology, social policy, sociology and political economy who seek to manage the contradictions of modernity and mitigate suffering and waste seemingly intrinsic to it.