Ending Veteran Homelessness Means Investing in More Programs

homeless Veterans

“War is hell.” ~General William Tecumseh Sherman, 1864

“Homelessness is hell.” ~Open Door Community

For many veterans, the toll taken by combat is measured by more than battle scars and war stories. The emotional and psychological wounds inflicted on soldiers present real barriers in their attempt to re-enter civilian society. Compounding the issue is that many of these men and women have spent years honing skills that have little application to our day-to-day. This leaves them at a disadvantage when it comes to work opportunities. Cynics say that every day the world rolls over someone that was just on top of it yesterday. If there’s some truth to that adage, it potentially leaves once-proud veterans in a vulnerable position.

Homeless Veterans

As an indication of just how prevalent homelessness is among veterans, check out this mapping tool that collects data on numbers by state, complete with a radial to select veteran numbers.

This isn’t an anti-army article. But clearly there is an undeniable link between serving in the army and homelessness. This link is why invisiblepeople.tv has covered veteran homelessness time and again, and it’s worth exploring at more depth. What contributes to disproportionately high levels of veteran homelessness? What is being done to help this vulnerable demographic?

Complex Factors, Both Shared and Unique

The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans lists contributing factors giving rise to homelessness into two categories:

  1. factors that influence all homeless individuals, and
  2. factors that are unique to a particular subset:
    1. Extreme shortage of affordable housing, livable income and access to health care.
    2. Lingering effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance abuse, compounded by a lack of family and social support networks.

Both categories play a role in potential veteran homelessness. Compounding the issue, military occupation and training are rarely transferable to the civilian workforce. This places vets at a distinct disadvantage when competing for employment against people who hadn’t spent the last decade of their life overseas. (Akin to having money in your pocket, but not in the currency of the country you happen to find yourself in. There’s value in it, sure. Just not where you are.)

Not that there aren’t programs in place to retrain ex-servicemen after retiring from the army. There are several programs that exist for precisely this reason, namely, to help ‘after the army,’ as goarmy.com puts it. However, a house is only as strong as the foundation it’s built on.

Regardless of the number of programs available for this potentially vulnerable demographic, there needs to be a functional, well-balanced, emotionally stable person on which to develop these new skills. What happens when new skills are built on a foundation of frequently undiagnosed and untreated mental illness? We can’t be too surprised when graduates of even the most skillfully developed re-entry programs collapse.

‘A Public Health Problem’

Dr Jack Tsai, Clinical Psychologist at Yale University, remarked upon evolving views of what contributes to homelessness. “In the past, homelessness was largely viewed as an economic problem. But due to deinstitutionalization of those with severe mental illness and the increasing visibility of homelessness in large cities, homelessness really has become a public health problem, and one closely related to mental illness.”

The intent here isn’t to paint all veterans with the same broad brush of mental illness. A study conducted by Pew Research Center examined why some veterans readjust to civilian life with ease, whereas others have a hard time making the same transition.

hard or easy entry to civilian life

Note that while pre-military education played a role in veterans successfully re-entering civilian life, the predisposing factor seems to be lingering consequences of a psychological trauma. The study comments on this finding: “The probabilities of an easy re-entry drop from 82% for those who did not experience a traumatic event to 56% for those who did, a 26-percentage point decline and the largest change recorded in this study.”

The Pew study resulted in a 10-variable model to assess whether a veteran is likely to have difficulty upon readjustment to civilian life. Use of these significant predictors may well help identify veterans that desperately need extra attention.

What Is America Doing to Help Their Vets?

Not nothing. There are US Army initiatives intended to ease re-entry for those opting out of service. These include a Partnership for Youth Success program that guarantees a job interview and possible employment with a cross section of private industry, academia, businesses and public institutes. And programs like these are a good start! Impressively, there have been some positive trends regarding homeless veterans. If consolation could be charted, it would look something like this:

homeless Veterans

The previously mentioned initiatives are bearing good fruit. Utilization of Pew Research Center’s 10-variable model could help identify vulnerable veterans. However, a long-term solution to veteran homelessness needs more than just supplying the tools.

To borrow a military analogy, it takes more than a gun to make a soldier. If training and rehabilitation services continue to underserve this vulnerable group, veteran homelessness will persist.

If war is the type of hell that breaks a person down, society must be there to build them back up.


Micah Bertoli

Micah Bertoli

  

Micah Bertoli is a Medical Laboratory Technologist and freelance writer. He is passionate about volunteer work, spending much time helping displaced people settle into their new environments.

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