Abel: We have to be able to break the path for home-lessness rather than building shelters. - Andrew Smith/Photography Editor

Dr. Wendel Abel, consultant psychiatrist and head of psychiatry at the University Hospital of the West Indies, is calling for the Government to develop more aggressive mental health programmes to address the problem of homeless people on the streets.

Dr. Abel said the solution to the country's growing street people problem was to develop intervention programmes while deploying outreach teams.

"Rather than building shelters for them, develop aggressive programmes to deal with this population who are predominantly male, who predominantly have a diagnosis of schizophrenia," he said.

Dr. Abel made the suggestion on Wednesday at a national conference on homelessness, while releasing details of a study on homelessness in Jamaica that was commissioned by the Planning Institute of Jamaica.

Giving injections

The study, entitled 'An Evaluation of Homelessness in Jamaica', showed that some 645 homeless people were on the streets. Of this number, the majority were from Kingston and St. Andrew, followed by St. James then Clarendon and St. Ann.

"What seems to work best for this population is your crisis and outreach teams, where you have a mobile unit that goes out and give injections at home and prevent them from coming on to the streets," Dr. Abel said. "So we have to be able to break the path for homelessness rather than building shelters."

Dr. Abel said it would be more beneficial to the country if the Government bought more vehicles to support these teams rather than supporting programmes that were going to house the homeless.

"We got to use the limited resources we have better and wiser. It is not about working harder, but working smarter," he pointed out.

The objectives of the study were to count the number of homeless adults on the streets and in shelters across Jamaica, to describe thesocio-demographic characteristics associated with the homeless,and to identify risk factors for homelessness.

The study, which was done over a four-month period in 2006, also showed that 24.9 per cent of those interviewed gave health reasons - mental illness and substance abuse - as reasons why they were on the streets.

Another 19.3 per cent cited family conflict and domestic violence, while 16.9 per cent offered a combination of health, economic, family conflict, deportation and migration to urban centres as reasons for being on the streets.