At the risk of opening a whole new can of worms, I think that diagnosing
the homeless as "mentally ill" is often tautologous. As in "You would
have to be crazy to prefer life on the streets to getting a low-wage
job." Personality psychologists have lately been emphasizing that
personality "disorders" largely amount to the extreme tails of
continuous personality distributions. For example, I would expect the
homeless to be extremely low in Conscientiousness.
Some of my related thoughts on this are available at:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/inecon.htm
--
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Department of Economics George Mason University
http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"[T]he power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in
those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
-- Edward Gibbon, *The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire*
