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Comment by ithilglin909 | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, I have volunteered with a number of organizations that help the homeless in Seattle. I don't know where you're getting 25-30% from, but that doesn't match with my experience -- I'm inclined to believe it's much higher, but it can really depend on what neighborhood you're in.

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I am really confused as to how your personal experience would ever be able to figure out the actual percentage of homeless people who suffer from mental illness/drug addiction. No amount of experience would tell you those percentages, because no experience would have you meeting with a uniform sample of the homeless. Your experience is always going to have a huge selection bias.

It takes rigorous research, with properly accounted for selection biases, to determine actual ratios of the population as a whole.

I mostly agree. But, surely, you'd agree that personal experience, especially extensive personal experience, might give one an inkling about whether a particular statistic is accurate. I wasn't arguing anything more.

I've looked at a number of studies about this. In general, it's hard to find much agreement between them about actual numbers. I suspect some of that is related to how "homelessness" and "mental illness" or "addiction" are defined by the people doing the studies, but most indicate that some kind of majority are influenced by one or more of those issues.

Ah sorry, mis-remembered the stats. Here's the number I was thinking of:

25% have a mental illness 35% have a substance issue

https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-pop...

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