> However, the vast majority of people who stay homeless are mentally ill.
That's likely true but it is only a very small portion of the total. And many of those are still not mentally ill, just substance abusers (which has it's own long term effects on mentality, compounding the problem).
DSM-IV counts substance abuse as a psychiatric disorder, and research has shown that it is far more effective to treat substance abuse as a health issue than otherwise.
But I think we may have to agree to disagree here.
I think we're already agreeing for the most part: Substance abuse is a different thing than being addicted, you can't use the terms interchangeably.
The one is a mental problem, the other has to do with the brain in a very specific biochemical sense.
I think that for the most part there is plenty of overlap between the two in terms of the people that are afflicted but there is a direct biochemical reason behind being addicted to any drug that is not directly related to mental illness.
To clarify, addiction is a disease. According to Dr Drew Pinsky in an interview on "The Eyes of Nye" (yes, that's another Bill Nye show)
> The definition of a disease for me would be 'an abnormal physiological process brought on by a relationship between the genetics of the individual and the environment. That path of physiology would create a set of signs and symptoms that progress in a predictable way that we would call a 'natural history' and by affecting the natural history we create a predictable response to treatment [...] and addiction does fit that, but people get hung up on where the physiology goes wrong. They don't understand that it's a brain disease.
That's likely true but it is only a very small portion of the total. And many of those are still not mentally ill, just substance abusers (which has it's own long term effects on mentality, compounding the problem).