They hear voices and hallucinate. Live on the streets and suffer from mental illness. Yet they walk around for 15 years without being treated.

Homeless people have symptoms of psychosis for 15 years before they receive treatment. This is shown by research led by senior physician Rasmus Handest from the Amager Psychiatric Center’s street plan team. This is a group that is disconnected from society in every way. “It is completely undignified,” he says.

Rasmus Handest discovered something that surprised him when, while working on his PhD, he delved into the life stories of homeless citizens with schizophrenia. The psychiatrist knew in advance that these were people who go under the radar and rarely stand on the barricades and require rapid treatment.

But his eyes widened as he crunched the numbers. While waiting times for other patient groups in psychiatry are zealously measured in days, weeks and months, the homeless people he interviewed had had psychotic symptoms for an average of 15.5 years before they were diagnosed with schizophrenia and entered treatment.