Every Homeless Person Has a Mother: Shining a Light on Prevention - Hardcover

by Jacqueline Janssen (Author)

Every Homeless Person Has a Mother challenges one of the most overlooked failures in mental health care: the systematic exclusion of families from treatment and recovery.

Across the country, families watch someone they love disappear into serious mental illness, often exacerbated by anosognosia, a brain disorder that prevents a person from recognizing they are ill. Families are frequently shut out as frameworks like HIPAA are misunderstood or misused. Mothers' and caregivers' voices are too often disregarded, while their loved ones end up homeless, incarcerated, hospitalized, or trapped in repeated cycles of crisis.

Drawing on lived experience, advocacy, policy insight, and emerging evidence around clinician-family collaboration, Jacqueline Janssen offers a compassionate, practical, and deeply hopeful alternative. Citing evidence that informed family involvement improves recovery outcomes, she proposes a model in which clinicians and families work together-not in blame, but in partnership-to reduce relapses, lessen suffering, support recovery, and help prevent homelessness.

Part memoir, part advocacy, and part call to action, Every Homeless Person Has a Mother gives voice to families too often left unseen while offering tools, stories, and strategies for earlier intervention, recovery, and human connection.

This book is for families, clinicians, advocates, policymakers, and anyone searching for a more humane and effective response to serious mental illness. Early reviewers have called it "urgent."