The Cycle of Struggle: How Homelessness and Food Insecurity Affect Mental Health

Homelessness and food insecurity can be best understood as symptoms of the larger issues of poverty and inequality. These issues create an intersection between physical health and mental health, resulting in a continuous cyclic struggle that has no end. Food-insecure homeless individuals tend to have a greater probability of experiencing depressive symptoms or depression. Combating all these challenges while knowing what connects them is crucial to helping those in need. The first, second, and third sustainable goals of no poverty, zero hunger, and good health and well-being all pertain to and deal with the problem at hand.

Homelessness and Its Causes

Homelessness is a situation in which an individual is without stable, permanent, safe, and appropriate housing or the immediate means or ability to acquire it. It is a worrying social phenomenon that affects at least 150 million people worldwide, i.e., 2% of the population. Globally, there are also an estimated 1.6 billion people who lack adequate housing.

There exists heterogeneity among the homeless in regards to the degree to which they differ from each other in income, shelter usage, social networks, and health status, all factors that also affect their ability to achieve food security.

Its causes include:

• Shortage of affordable homes: The lack of homes at affordable rates is a major reason for people being homeless. Their income is insufficient to afford homes at the prevailing market prices.

• Discrimination: Discrimination based on caste, race, and religion may also be the reason why some families are left without homes. People with rigid and insensitive beliefs would not want to sell their homes to those who differ from them.
• Family/domestic violence: Sometimes, domestic violence leads to the victims running away from their homes to stay away from their perpetrators. This leads them to the state of being homeless because of a lack of resources.

Food Insecurity and Its Causes

Food insecurity is a multidimensional concept that includes deficits in food quantity or quality, anxiety over the supply of food, and engagement in behaviours such as skipping meals or obtaining food from nontraditional sources. The number of food-insecure individuals is estimated to have reached 900 million in 2023.

It is a complex phenomenon, generally understood through an economic lens as inadequate access to food. It has negative mental health outcomes, including depression, anxiety disorders/ mood disorders, or suicidal thoughts.

Its factors include:

• Income inequality: Less income forces people to resort to unhealthy foods, which can lead to chronic illnesses in the long term.
• Poverty is a condition in which an individual lacks the essential means for a certain standard of living. This lack of resources directly affects the quantity of food available to an individual.
• Urbanization: Urbanization gives rise to an increased number of processed foods in the name of technological upgradation, which adversely affects the physical health of individuals.

Can Homelessness and Food Insecurity be Conflated?

Rooted in poverty, both homelessness and food insecurity arise from the lack of sufficient financial resources. Due to the extreme poverty of the homeless, they do not have enough resources to sustain themselves, which prevents them from accessing nutritionally adequate foods. 

Another pathway that links the two is that some mental health conditions arise out of these issues. Most of the daily energy intake of the homeless comes from highly processed food due to the unavailability of the means of procuring natural food. Due to this, this population group experiences poor nutrition and nutritional deficiencies, which, if sustained, can have severe negative health impacts, including the potential development of mental illnesses.

Impact of Homelessness and Food Insecurity

Homelessness itself has negative impacts on physical and mental health as well as causes food insecurity, which is another significant problem in itself. 

• Both food insecurity and housing instability give rise to the poor physical and mental health of people, especially children, because of which they lag behind peers in physical development, educational attainment, and labour market outcomes.
• They are risk factors for parents experiencing depression or going through parenting stress, as the absence of a roof over your head is a taxing ordeal. When coupled with food insecurity, it further heightens the level of stress, severely degrading one’s mental health.
• Both are associated with an increased risk for cardiovascular disease mortality rate and greater healthcare cost utilization.

Families experiencing homelessness and food insecurity resort to coping strategies that can also harm health:

• Parents may eat less so children can eat. Household members may do without medical care or prescriptions. They may be unable to take medicine as properly directed because there is no money available, hence giving way to their slowly deteriorating health.
• Likewise, when the rent eats up most of a household’s paycheck, families barely have any money available for other necessities like nutritious food and medical care.
• People experiencing housing insecurity may be forced to live in substandard housing replete with dangerous conditions, e.g., exposure to toxins.

How to Combat these Issues?

To break the vicious cycle of homelessness and food insecurity, the proper steps need to be taken to combat these issues:

Homelessness can be tackled by supporting affordable housing, offering resources to shelters, and advocating for policy changes for a change in fair wages. The increase in fair wages can also help address the problem of food insecurity, as higher income allows for greater allocation of money to healthy food options. Contributing to food banks, volunteering at local food distribution centers, and campaigning for policies that provide healthy food options are other ways to battle food insecurity. 

Conclusion

Homelessness and food insecurity are not isolated problems; instead, they amplify each other, creating a storm of health deficiencies. Caused by factors ranging from income inequality to environmental change, these issues occupy center stage globally because of increasing poverty. The vicious mental health cycle wherein mental health issues like depression cause food insecurity, in turn, giving rise to more mental health problems, is never-ending and circles in a loop. However, steps should be taken for those in need to reduce the number of people suffering to a minimal amount.

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