Personality Disorder and Homelessness: Membership and ‘Unhoused Minds’ in Forensic Settings

Abstract

Although not all homeless people are personality disordered, many are offenders and all are de facto anti-social, either in their orientation to the world or in the eyes of the beholding world. We re-define and re-locate the problem from the social fact of the actual homelessness into the interpersonal and intrapsychic world of the ‘unhoused mind’, and explore the complex reciprocal relationship between the housed and the unhoused. The article concludes by discussing the impact on individual workers, staff teams and organizations who are tasked with attempting to help such people.