Homelessness, Mental Health, and Stressful Life Events.

The investigation of homelessness in Spain and throughout all of Europe involves two specific challenges: (1) that a prepared, official definition of homeless is not at the disposal of researchers, and (2) that few well-controlled studies exist to contribute to the knowledge base in this area. These obstacles are being slowly overcome through sociological [1] and psychosocial [2, 3] studies that provide significant information on homelessness through the systematic gathering of data. In the present article, we synthesize the main data on this topic available in our country, first, by presenting preliminary results of a project investigating the sociodemographic characteristics of the homeless in Madrid [4] and, second, by examining the complex relationships among homelessness, mental health, and stressful life events. The data are directly related to homeless people in the city of Madrid, but we shall compare this information with results from studies in other European and North American cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]