A woman sits on a bed surrounded by stuffed animals, with a cream wall covered in photographs, creating a cosy and homey environment.

What’s the link between homelessness and mental health?

Poor mental health is both a cause and consequence of homelessness.

  • Cause: Poor mental health can put you under enormous pressure. When this builds up, and you don’t have the right support around you, your risk of homelessness can dramatically increase.
  • Consequence: Homelessness is traumatic. It’s an emotionally and physically painful and lonely experience that has a lasting impact on mental health.

How housing pressures can cause poor mental health

  1. Keeping up with bills: Managing rent or mortgage payments and living costs can be overwhelming or even impossible, especially when finances are tight or you’re too ill to work. Work instability and high living costs only add to the pressure.
  2. Housing insecurity: Living in temporary or insecure housing can make building a life incredibly challenging. The uncertainty can make it difficult to sustain relationships, hold down a job, and access services like a GP.
  3. Maintaining a tenancy: When it feels like the walls are closing, managing house admin and upkeep becomes near impossible. If it becomes too much and these things are neglected, you could be evicted.
  4. Poor living conditions: Damp, mouldy, and cold environments can cause mental and physical health problems and feel like a pressure gauge on red. Declining health and unstable housing go hand in hand, making it even harder to find stability.

While I was in the hospital for my mental health, I lost my home as I could not afford the rent while not working. Not having a home and not knowing what I would do next was terrifying.

Rebecca
See how we supported Rebecca rebuild her life.
A woman is standing in a park, smiling, with flowers in the background.

When these pressures are turned up, the threat of homelessness becomes very real. Our Homelessness Prevention teams help thousands of Londoners each year with these issues, helping them remain in their homes.

How homelessness can cause poor mental health

Every type of homelessness is stressful, isolating, and traumatic to go through. The discrimination associated with homelessness can take a heavy toll on a person’s well-being, leaving people feeling marginalised, ashamed, and unworthy of support.

  • Rough sleeping: Sleeping on the streets is brutal, painful and dangerous. When you’re in survival mode, hunting for food and trying to stay warm and clean and protect yourself, it takes its toll on your body and your well-being and can cause long-term trauma.
  • Sofa surfing: The instability of relying on friends, family, and acquaintances day in and day out, never knowing when you’ll be asked to leave, is incredibly stressful and can lead to high anxiety. Living out of a bag provides no solid foundation to build a life, and it isn’t easy to plan the next week, never mind your future.
  • Temporary accommodation: When people are forced to live in temporary accommodation, it can be far away from valuable support networks and communities. Some people are moved as far as 200 miles from their home area. It can feel isolating, and it’s a struggle when you don’t have people you can rely on around you.
60% of our clients have a mental health problem
People on the street are 17x more likely to experience violence
Homeless people are 3.5x more likely to commit suicide than the general population

How we help

Homelessness is a traumatic experience filled with pain and challenges. It shows how strong people can be to get through it, but most need help along the way.

That’s why we embed mental health support in all our services. Whether working with clients facing severe conditions like psychosis or providing everyday well-being guidance, our approach is tailored to each person.

We know there’s still a lot of stigma around mental health problems. So, we have therapists on-site in our services. This helps to make our mental health support as accessible as possible and normalise talking about thoughts and feelings.

We believe in having open conversations about mental health, focusing on people’s strengths and goals, not just their problems. We want every Londoner we support to have the skills to live independently, feel empowered to manage their mental health in the future and be resilient to future challenges.

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