Word: chronical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Congressman Barney Frank, ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee (which oversees government housing agencies), is not kind about the Bush Administration's intentions. "They are just lying when they say they have a housing program," he says. And of the additional $35 million pledged to end chronic homelessness, Frank says, "it's not only peanuts; it's taking the peanuts from one dish and putting them in another." In fact, in October the House Appropriations Committee approved a bill that, if it becomes law, will cut $938 million from the President's budget for rental vouchers...
Neither cracking down on vagrancy nor Bush's plan to end chronic homelessness is going to help the growing number of families without housing. David and Gina Christian and their four children have avoided the streets by staying in a 600-sq.-ft. apartment at the Interfaith House in Dallas, which provides three months' housing to 100 needy families each year. David, 34, lost his job fixing rental cars in Austin after Sept. 11 when the tourism industry fell apart. Gina, 36, wasn't making enough as a nursing-home temp to cover the family's expenses. The Christians hocked...
...many are without a home but have temporary shelter, the real policy debate is no longer about whether society is responsible for keeping people out of the cold--we have agreed it is--but whether it is obligated to give them somewhere permanent to live. By fighting to end chronic homelessness, the Bush Administration argues that we need to give houses to those who are incapable of providing for themselves. The others will have to weather the storm in a shelter, if it can be built fast enough. --Reported by Simon Crittle and Jyoti Thottam/New York, Laura A. Locke/San Francisco...
...illness like clinical depression will send biochemical shock waves through the body. But the intimate relationship of body to mind isn't limited to serious disease. Researchers have come to understand that what lies below the neck can also be harmed by less acute kinds of brain disturbances. The chronic stress that millions of people feel from simply trying to deal with the pressures of modern life can unleash a flood of hormones that are useful in the short term but subtly toxic if they persist. Thus it shouldn't come as a surprise that stress-reduction strategies that take...
Diabetes is another illness that doesn't go well with depression. It's well known that 10% of diabetic men and 20% of diabetic women also have depression--about twice the rate in the general population. It's natural to be depressed about having a chronic, potentially fatal illness, but that doesn't entirely explain the discrepancy. Moreover, depressed diabetics are much more likely than those without depression to suffer complications including heart disease, nerve damage and blindness. Somehow depression makes the body less responsive to insulin, the hormone that processes blood sugar--plausibly through the action of cortisol...