excluded from medical and social public services. This phenomenon is not a new one. The most fragile categories of
society are part of the excluded ones. There are few exceptions and we are talking about a valid observation in
different times, different continents, under different political regimes. The permanence of the phenomenon can hide
its complexity. The operational definitions are often missing. Explanations are frequently reduced to the socioeconomic
dimension. Thus, divorce, income shortcoming, higher prices in real estate, falling living standards
(impoverishment) and the uncertainty of a job are often invoked reasons for loss of home. This explicative
dimension is not neutral because it guides public policies.
Living in the streets turns out to be a self-destructive process which modifies the way to relate to health: social
desirability norms become more and more meaningless, perception of pain and medical emergency is altered, except
for very severe cases. This abandonment of one’s own body and life’s difficulties in the streets render the
encountered medical pathologies more complex.
In Romania, the study of homeless people’s behaviour is still in the beginning, as we have already mentioned
above. This research adds to the current knowledge in the field, especially in our cultural space. Basically, it opens
up a new direction of research and the obtained results have a wide practical applicability.
The study is based on a ten-year experience of psychologically assisting adult homeless people in projects carried
out by Medecins Sans Frontieres-Belgium (2000-2004) and Samusocial-Romania (2005-2009). In our daily
observations during counselling sessions for adult homeless people, we have noticed there are some differences in
their way of behaving with those around them and relating to oneself (the way they describe themselves, they
perceive their own needs, they relate to past, present and future).