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Keep Your Sunny Side: A Street-Level Look at Homelessness

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Abstract

This opinion piece considers my personal experiences of poverty, homelessness, loss, and physical disability in relation to recent discussions of social defeat and resistance among permanent supported housing tenants with physical and mental illnesses. By drawing attention to the onslaught of deprivation and humiliation that generally comes with the territory of poverty and homelessness in the United States, I hope to influence the ways in which clinicians, social service providers, and scholars think about specific instances of social defeat and resistance. My basic point is that any specific experience of resistance or defeat cannot be adequately understood in isolation. Rather, such experiences must be understood in relation to individual life histories of defeat and resistance, and to the symbolic and material sources of success and failure available to citizens who occupy a particular section of social space in a given society.

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Notes

  1. Furthermore, insofar as homelessness leads to higher rates of incarceration and emergency medical service use, both of which are extremely costly to the public, permanent supported housing may actually be the most economically viable solution to homelessness currently on the table (Culhane et al. 2002).

  2. This is a reference to the location of the Salvation Army homeless shelter in Austin, Texas—just a few blocks away from the state capital and a number of high-rise apartments where many of Austin’s “creative class,” to borrow Richard Florida’s (2002) term, reside.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Supported Housing Tenant, Austin, TX, USA

    Stephen Giles Frischmuth

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  1. Stephen Giles Frischmuth
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Correspondence to Stephen Giles Frischmuth.

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Frischmuth, S.G. Keep Your Sunny Side: A Street-Level Look at Homelessness. Cult Med Psychiatry 38, 312–323 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9372-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9372-0

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