A YOUNG man sleeps in the doorway of an empty shop on Argyle street, Glasgow. People pass by the low pile of blankets and flattened cardboard boxes, often barely glancing his way. David is the first person that homeless charity the Simon Community in Scotland’s street team introduce me to, and in many ways his tale is the most shocking. When he looks up his eyes are a sparkling intense blue, but his cheeks are hollowed by years of addiction and homelessness. The story of how he came here, and what he has experienced on these streets, is both traumatic and disturbing. He is not alone in this. Many who end up homeless suffer from mental health problems and addiction – and there is a well-established link between substance misuse and exposure to trauma and homelessness.

Eight years ago, when David was 21 years old, his younger sister was brutally murdered in Maryhill. Following her death, he and his father entered what he describes as a “heavy depression”. His father started drinking and David turned to drugs. A scaffolder by trade, he found work impossible. “I couldn’t focus straight. I just kept going into a depression. I just wanted to take drugs to try to cover it up. But nothing was covering it up. I just kept thinking about it all the time and all that.”

Eventually his dad threw him out. “Not so much because of the drugs,” says David, “but because I hadn’t protected her. He said since I was the oldest brother I should have protected her.” But David had been working in Inverness on the day his sister was killed.

David has spent the last few years mostly living in homeless hostels or sleeping rough on the street. A couple of weeks ago he was thrown out of his latest accommodation - “for fighting”, he says. Currently he is on a methadone programme and trying “to get off drugs”. His mental health remains an issue. The depression David has experienced is not unusual among the homeless. They are ten times more likely to experience it than the general population. In 2015, 32% of homeless people reported a mental health problem. Yet, as staff of the Simon Community in Scotland point out, there is no mention of homelessness in the Scottish Government’s current draft mental health strategy.

It’s a mild December morning, not so cold as the previous week, but nevertheless David barely slept during the night. “It’s scary here at 3am when you’re trying to get to sleep. I’ve been battered before. You’re lying sleeping and somebody comes up and kicks you in the face. They just don’t like the look of you. Somebody drunk. It’s mental. You’re lying there and you’re just pure stunned. The guy just walks on. It’s mental.”

Such violence is also a common experience for the rough-sleeper. Among the most distressing stories I hear during my time with the Simon Community, are of such abuse. According to worker Elaine Jameson, the charity has come across homeless people who have been “spat upon, had their sleeping bags set on fire, assaulted and verbally abused”.

Her colleague, Paul Rush adds: “You get people coming out of clubs peeing on guys that are sleeping rough, kicking them. It happens often. It’s almost as if it’s a sport.”

And there is sexual abuse too. Thirty-year-old, Michelle, recalls, abuse and harassment while sleeping rough. “A couple of times I’ve woken up and there’s been dirty old men standing over me, touching themselves. Then there’s the amount of men you get, asking, ‘Are you a street girl? Are you working?’.”

Compared to the general public, rough sleepers are 13 times more likely to have experienced violence and 47 times more likely to be victims of theft. One UK study found that almost one in ten homeless people had experienced sexual assault in the previous year.

While official homelessness figures in Scotland, have fallen slightly in recent years, the number of people rough-sleeping has risen. Demand for the Glasgow winter shelter went up by 94% last year. Many blame this on the closure of the council-run hostels eight years ago. There are also, the Simon Community Scotland street team tell me, more visible signs of homelessness on the street. However, homelessness is not only rough-sleeping. Anyone who is sofa-surfing or in emergency accommodation is also classed as homeless.

Outside a club for the homeless run by the Marie Trust, a small group of men have gathered in the run-up to lunchtime. Not all are there for the food and facilities – some have simply turned up looking for the company of friends, and to drink together. Among them is Peter, a 62 year old, who has regarded the street under Central Station railway bridge as his home for the last 27 years. A Welshman, he came, to Scotland for love. “A woman brought me here. I met her on holiday and she said, ‘Come to Glasgow’. She had two children, and she had broken up from their dad. But then she went back him. That’s how I became homeless. I was heart broken. I ended up staying on the streets, Central Station.”

Peter walks with a stick and says his body “is f**ed”, but also declares himself “a survivor”. The average life expectancy of a long-term rough sleeper like him is just 47.

Many of the long-term homeless are caught in an endless cycle of getting accommodation, losing it, rough-sleeping, and jail. Among these is Michael, just released from a ten month prison stint only weeks ago, whom I meet at the homeless centre on Clyde Place where he has recently secured a room. Michael has been homeless for over twenty years, since his partner threw him out when he was 21. He has addiction problems. He is a former heroin user, now on a methadone programme. He also has mental health issues. “I suffer from paranoia,” he says.

Research has shown that a lack of stable accommodation increases the risk of reoffending. Yet, like many coming out of prison – 15% in fact - Michael was liberated into homelessness. “We often,” says Simon Community worker Elaine Jameson, “find that people we come in contact with are released from prison or hospital without any planning for coming out. And they are released back into homelessness, the thing that likely put them in prison in the first place. “

Meanwhile, round 20% of rough-sleepers are women, like 30-year-old Michelle, though she recently found accommodation. A sparky young woman, she has been homeless for two years now, propelled there by her partner's domestic violence. Mostly she talks about her son, who has been in care since she became homeless, and whom she sees once a week. “He still recognises me as mum. I think it would kill me if I heard him call someone else mum.”

Not that many years ago, Michelle had her own home. In her mid-twenties, she recalls, things had seemed like they were going fine: she was working in pubs and had her own flat. “But then I met the wean’s dad, and everything went bad.” As a new mother, she was a victim of frequent physical violence. “I was waking up and getting hit every morning,” she says. “It was happening every morning, every night, every day. I left for the sake of my wee boy. I thought, I don’t know if I’m going to get beaten one night and not wake up the next morning.”

Her baby was then taken into care. For a while she stayed in a hostel and then with a friend who let her stay with him, but later he told her to leave. It was a cold autumn day and Michelle found herself walking out into the street with nothing on her but the clothes she was wearing – jogging bottoms, top, light jacket. No money, no phone, not even a toothbrush.

Recently the Simon Community launched an appeal for people do donate rucksacks filled with items for homeless people – from toiletries through to clean underwear. Such a bag would have been a godsend for Michelle who arrived on the street with nothing. Today, December 4, is donation day, and bags can be dropped off at a centre at 24 Rosyth Road.

During the weeks Michelle was on the street the temperatures dipped below zero, to minus six degrees. “The cold was the worst thing. I thought I can’t go to sleep because I don’t know if I’m going to wake up because I might die of hypothermia during the night. Every little sound of someone walking past is so scary. I was absolutely frozen.” The Simon community workers recall that they approached her during that time and that she seemed to have given up hope and showed little interest in applying for accommodation, partly because she feared she would be knocked back, or have to wait many days, as is often the case.

“Then the snow came,” says Michelle, and it was this that drove her to take up the street team’s offer of help applying for emergency accommodation. She was scared she wouldn’t last on the streets otherwise.

Now, a few weeks in to her stay at a centre in Govanhill she’s feeling more positive. “I’m hoping I get my flat again, and get the wean back,” she says.

Some names have been changed in this article on the request of the individuals concerned

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