23. Are the Homeless Crazy?

Despite the factual information of mass losses of houses and jobs in the 1960~70's, people doubt the majority of the homeless people to be former patients of some mental hostpitals that were deinstitutionalized as well in the 1970s. It is clear that although some of the patients might have had no place to go after the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals, many were put in to boarding houses or given low-income housing, therefore there is a less chance that the majority of the homeless were due to deinstitutionalization. The reason why the mentally disabled people were accused of being the reason for having homelesses seems to be because of their powerless stance in the society and how people normally look down on them. Evidence proves that reasons for poverty is primarily due to economical reasons than clinical. The reason why the press demands so much attention for this mental illness issue is because, "mental ilness places the destitute outside the sphere of ordinary life. It personalizes an anguish that is public in its genesis; it individualizes a misery that is both general in cause and geeral in application".

The author of thsi article, Jonathan Kozol, seemed like he had a lot of dissatisfaction of how the mental illnesses were viewed. He first starts out his article by covering the basic background information of how people are seeing the homeless today; that most of them emerged from deinstitutionalized mental hospitls. However, in his following paragraph, he directly counter aruges this stance by firmly stating that "the primary reason is economic rather than clinial". Through his providence of data, numbers, credible sources and even prorviding the approximate time era of when these surverys were taken, his claims are supported thoroughly and enough to be able to persude his readers. Overall I think Kozol did well in persuading his readers with credible evidence and enough explanation to support his arguemnts. His aritcle was not hard to follow at all, and I really liked how his title got my attention.  "Are the Homeless Crazy?" sounds very absurd, as if he was trying to mock those whoever called the homeless crazy.