Services for elders with severe mental illness (SMI) have major deficiencies, among them a lack of adequate psychosocial services. Some analysts have attributed this situation to "double stigmatization" targeting both ageing and mental illness in our societies. Using qualitative methods (23 semi-directed interviews, theme-based content analysis), our exploratory research aims to understand better the perceptions of psychosocial practitioners working in community and institutional settings about the elderly with SMI and their living situations. Our informants evoke living situations marked by a lack of support (isolation), of resources (financial precariousness/poverty) and of power (learned passivity), traits that are related not only to mental illness per se, but also to long term psychiatric institutionalization. For them, the current situation of elders with SMI is the end product of biographies in which life-course, illness-course and life in services and/or institutions join and, sometimes, become indistinguishable. Implications for psychosocial practices are discussed.

In South India, where the majority of the country's cases of HIV are concentrated, transmission of infection occurs mainly within networks composed of female sex workers, their clients and the other sexual partners of the latter. This study aims to determine how gender relations affect the risks of HIV transmission in this region. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 30 clients and analysed qualitatively. Results show that clients perceive sexual relations with female sex workers as a vice involving loss of control and contact with women at the bottom of the social ladder. Paradoxically, this sometimes allows them to conform to the masculine ideal, in giving sexual satisfaction to a woman, in a context of incompatibility between the idealised and actual masculine and feminine archetypes. Attitudes to condoms, affected by various facets of the client-female sex worker relationship, are indicators of the link between this relationship and the risks of contracting HIV. The results suggest that there is a need for expanding targeted HIV prevention towards clients and female sex workers alongside more general interventions on gender issues, particularly among young people, focusing on the structural elements moulding current relations between men and women, with particular consideration of local cultural characteristics.

This study aimed to identify and compare major areas of met and unmet needs reported by 455 homeless or recently housed individuals recruited from emergency shelters, temporary housing, and permanent housing in Quebec (Canada). Mixed methods, guided by the Maslow framework, were used. Basic needs were the strongest needs category identified, followed by health and social services (an emergent category), and safety; very few participants expressed needs in the higher-order categories of love and belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization. The only significant differences between the three housing groups occurred in basic needs met, which favored permanent housing residents. Safety was the only category where individuals reported more unmet than met needs. The study results suggested that increased overall access to and continuity of care with family physicians, MD or SUD clinicians and community organizations for social integration should be provided to help better these individuals. Case management, stigma prevention, supported employment programs, peer support and day centers should particularly be more widely implemented as interventions that may promote a higher incidence of met needs in specific needs categories.