Survey on addiction and mental health status of the homeless

Abstract

Homelessness is recognized as a problem of lack of housing as well as a social problem entangled by complex problems such as unemployment, family breakdown, social exclusion, health and suicide. In order to search for the specificity of any particular addiction type, we conducted a survey on the addiction and mental health status of the homeless. One of our findings indicated that alcoholism was mainly found more in older homeless; however, internet game and smart phone addiction was found more in younger generations. We hope that our study is meaningful as a typification work at the current stage because there have been few studies in Korea on homeless youth and no study about homeless people's addiction problems other than alcoholism.