Why is it important to talk about trauma in relation to homelessness and transitional housing?
SAMHSA defines homelessness as: “People who are living in a place not meant for human habitation.”
When someone’s experiencing homelessness, it often means that people are sleeping outside, on the streets, in their cars, and in homeless shelters—places we can agree are not meant for human habitation.
Note: Images of transitional shelter sites in Eugene, OR.
And yet through a trauma-informed lens, when you look at our traditional shelter system, you will also see a majority of places not meant for human habitation.
Brain research shows that the kind of shelters that most of our communities have actually make it harder for the people who stay there to get out of homelessness.
Looking at the brain science around trauma helps us understand what goes on in the brain of someone experiencing something as stressful as homelessness.
When someone’s brain is exposed to any stress, the brain releases chemicals to help us get through that stress—the release of these chemicals leads to what is often called “survival mode.”
When you’re in survival mode, the chemical reaction turns off your prefrontal cortex. The part of your brain that’s responsible for all of our uniquely human brain functions, things like critical thinking and comprehension, logic, and rationality.
You don’t have these things available to you in survival mode because your prefrontal cortex is unplugged and offline—even if you tried really hard this chemical reaction would prevent you from bringing it back online. You’re left in survival mode—the fight, flight, or freeze system that leaves you on high alert, ready for danger.
Survival mode can be really helpful. In a life-threatening situation, this adaptation allows us to ensure our survival by fighting against a wild animal or running for safety from a dangerous situation.
The problem is… it’s also triggered by things like homelessness. When you lose your home, have to live on the streets, or in your car, it puts your brain into the same state as if it was being attacked by a wild animal. And when you experience prolonged homelessness, for months or years, your brain stays in survival mode and eventually rewires it to be a constant state.
What was once a momentarily life-saving adaptation, like in the case of wild animal attack, becomes maladaptive coping.
It turns into a trauma—where the brain is so overwhelmed with stress chemicals like cortisol, and adrenaline, that it starts to rewire itself into being in a constant stress response. Even when there’s nothing to be afraid of, the brain is hyper-vigilant about scanning the environment to find where the danger might come from next.
“As a result of this hyper-vigilance survival mode, you experience slowed thinking, you have a hard time making decisions and you just can’t concentrate. You can only understand every third word said to you.”
On top of the ongoing stress, when you experience prolonged survival mode, it leads to negative health outcomes…
You’re more likely to get lung cancer, hepatitis and lung disease like COPD,
You’re 4x as likely to be depressed,
And you’re 12x as likely to commit suicide.
Eventually prolonged exposure to survival mode leads to early death.
The average life span of a homeless person was shorter by about 17.5 years than that recorded for the general population.
The average age at death of a homeless male was 56.27 years old (SD 10.38), and 52.00 years old (SD 9.85) of a homeless female
And this was the most conservative number I could find…
One would hope that going into a homeless shelter would help stop this survival mode and help us get back onto our thinking parts of our brains. But that isn’t what happens…our traditional homeless shelters actually make this stress response worse! Because they’re set up in messy and chaotic ways, that just exacerbate the stress and anxiety in the brain.
Note: Images of transitional shelter sites in Eugene, OR.
Note: Images of transitional shelter sites in Eugene, OR.
Shelters are often in warehouses with long rows of cots on the floor. leaving people without any dignity or privacy. Shelters have rigid expectations that make people feel powerless. And controlled. There are long lists of rules that people are supposed to read, understand, and follow even though survival mode prevents them from having things like reading comprehension and impulse control available to them. People can’t get a job or be able to get back into permanent housing because the thinking part of their brain is literally turned off.
These folks are actually being prevented from helping themselves because they're in survival mode. And our messy, chaotic shelters are making things worse.
To help people move beyond homelessness, we need to provide shelter that actually helps people get out of survival mode, and back into the thinking parts of their brain. And trauma-informed design offers us a solution.
There’s a growing number of designers, planners, and researchers who are making adopting a new trauma-informed process to address how the built environment can be designed in a way that literally changes the chemical reaction in the brain, helping residents to think logically and creatively about their world. That way residents can actually understand and follow the shelter rules, benefit from the services that the shelter wants to provide and make the kind of changes they want to see in their life.
“If an organism is stuck in survival mode, its energies are focused on fighting off unseen enemies, which leaves no room for future, care, and love. For us humans, it means that as long as the mind is defending itself against invisible assaults, our closest bonds are threatened, along with our ability to imagine, plan, play, and pay attention to other people’s needs.” Bessel(76)
This information is especially relevant as cities around the US are designing systems to end houselessness—and some are doing just the things that will exacerbate the trauma that the unhoused already experience.
For example, the mayor of Portland has created new legislation to force people to live in city-sanctioned camps, making camping illegal. These large sites will likely be chaotic, messy, loud environments where people will be forced into survival mode. This move also takes away agency from the people and puts them in places where they will continue to be triggered. Learn more about the Portland approach.