Peer support among persons with severe mental illnesses: A review of evidence and experience
Peer support is largely considered to represent a recent advance in community mental health, introduced in the 1990s as part of the mental health service user movement. Actually, peer support has its roots in the moral treatment era inaugurated by Pussin and Pinel in France at the end of the 18th century, and has re-emerged at different times throughout the history of psychiatry. In its more recent form, peer support is rapidly expanding in a number of countries and, as a result, has become the focus of considerable research. Thus far, there is evidence that peer staff providing conventional mental health services can be effective in engaging people into care, reducing the use of emergency rooms and hospitals, and reducing substance use among persons with co-occurring substance use disorders. When providing peer support that involves positive self-disclosure, role modeling, and conditional regard, peer staff have also been found to increase participants’ sense of hope, control, and ability to effect changes in their lives; increase their self-care, sense of community belonging, and satisfaction with various life domains; and decrease participants’ level of depression and psychosis.
Rethinking Research on Forming Typologies of Homelessness
In homelessness research and policymaking, it seems to be axiomatic that single adults experience 3 temporally based types of homelessness: chronic, episodic, and transitional. We discuss problems with the theorization of this typology and with the research design, data analysis, and time-aggregated conceptualization and measurement of temporality in the empirical work supporting the typology. To address the latter, we suggest a time-patterned approach to temporality and report a 10-group typology that differs significantly from the more familiar 3-group typology. We argue that which approach is used—and how typologies are developed more generally—should be based on theory and the uses to which typologies are put rather than on claims to being more true.
When the Bough Breaks:
Living without permanent, long-term housing creates a number of stressors for children and families, but being homeless can be particularly detrimental to the healthy development of young children. The National Center on Family Homelessness reports that more than 1.6 million children--or one in 45 children--were homeless annually in America between 2006 and 2010. It is estimated that 40 percent of homeless children, or roughly 640,000 over that timeframe, were under the age of six. This brief highlights the effects of homelessness on children, with a particular emphasis on young children, and notes several policies and practices that could help mitigate negative outcomes. (Contains 36 endnotes.)

Systematic review examining differences in HIV, sexually transmitted infections and health-related harms between migrant and non-migrant female sex workers
Abstract
Objectives To assess the