The mental illness that most homeless people have is substance abuse disorders, followed by major depression and severe mental health conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Although mental health challenges are still widespread, the main and primary drivers of the homeless people are systemic economic factors, most particularly having a severe lack of any affordable housing or job losses.
In many homeless people, substance use disorders including illegal drug use are the most prevalent in homeless people, affecting an estimated 44 percent to 56 percent of homeless people.
If you go around homeless camps and areas, you can see a lot of illegal drug use such as needles and even can often notice where needles have inserted their arms.
Not all homeless people do illegal drugs, but a lot of them do, even if you don't notice it.
Severe mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and even major depression impact around 20% to 30% of chronically homeless people.
And even mood disorders like major depression alone affects around 19% of the demographic of homeless population.
Mental health and homeless also often create a vicious cycle, and severe psychological distress can also precipitate loss of housing, and even the trauma of being unsheltered severely makes these existing conditions worse.
Some homeless people are homeless as they put themselves in that situation.
And other homeless people are homeless out of nothing they did as even previous hard working people who even had good jobs and good housing can become homeless and have.
I like to help the homeless myself and will only buy them food from a restaurant as if I give them money, I'm afraid that they might use the money to buy drugs instead of food or shelter or something else to really help them.
The drug use is also why many people have trouble trying to help them as they don't want their money going toward buying illegal drugs, when the person intended the money to be used to help the homeless person.