This paper focuses on policy responses to promote positive housing outcomes, including strategies for inter-sectoral collaboration for policy agenda setting and implementation, addressing community stigma, tackling professional resistance to mental health reform, developing advocacy alliances, providing housing models which address social isolation, and challenging medical discourses on disability.

In Australia, it is widely believed that most homeless people have mental health issues, and that mental illness is a primary cause of homelessness. This paper uses information from a study of 4291 homeless people in Melbourne to investigate these propositions.

Rural communities in developed countries such as Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland have experienced profound challenges over the past three decades. The social fabric of rural communities in these countries has been and will continue to be affected by global and local processes that compound poverty and exclusion. The paper then...