Anyone who is without a home or shelter, who has to sleep against a building wall or at a covered bus stop is particularly at risk in winter.
On the night of December 14, a man died in the cold in Frankfurt.
The homeless man had slept in front of a discount store and was found lifeless by social workers in the morning.
The Frankfurt social affairs officer Elke Voitl (Die Grünen) reacted to the death with dismay and sadness, but is convinced that nobody in her city should sleep on the streets.
There is enough accommodation and help.
In view of this, one can ask oneself why there are people in the city who do not go to a facility even when it is cold.
Is the widespread view that the homeless choose their living situation voluntarily correct?
Women as a particularly vulnerable group
That is just as wrong an assumption as the assumption that drugs are inevitably involved when someone lives on the street, explains Elfi Ilgmann-Weiss.
She has a degree in education and works for the Frankfurt association for social homes.
For years she coordinated the cold bus and worked in outreach street social work.
According to Ilgmann-Weiss, the real reason why people live on the streets is their inability to turn life around for the better on their own.
"They are unable to accept help because of their mental health," she says.
In addition, in many cases they lack an intact social environment, a human safety net.
Among the homeless, women are a particularly vulnerable group. "The women we look after on the street are usually much more severely impaired than men," reports Christine Heinrichs, deputy managing director of the Frankfurt association, which focuses on people in existential difficulties emergencies.
He is the first point of contact for anyone on the ground and the last resort for those on the decline.
As Heinrichs reports, homeless women live far less often than men in pairs or groups.
Some of them fluctuated between shelters and the streets.
"Anyone who manifestly lives on the street suffers from extremely serious problems," she says.
"The women on the street are usually mentally disturbed to severely stressed," describes qualified teacher Ilgmann-Weiss.
They fell through every grid.
If you look at a woman's homelessness, she has often been living on the streets for a long time: "Experience has shown that women take care of themselves longer than men.
As a result, it takes longer before they are visibly homeless.” On the other hand, these women are more at risk, are more likely to be assaulted and are generally less emotionally robust than men.
But why do these women end up on the streets at all?
The use of intoxicants is usually not the actual reason, but a consequence and later an intensifier of the problems.
"You also take drugs to make your skin thicker - or at least that's how it feels for a moment, your skin doesn't really get thicker," says Heinrichs.
Delusional disorders often play a role
The cause is not to be found in drug use, but much earlier.
The real reasons why these women are homeless and sometimes homeless are almost exclusively psychological in nature.
Delusional disorders would often play a role.
Those affected hear voices, interpret everyday events as caused by them or related to them, some feel followed, spied on or exposed to dangerous radiation.
"Many simply can't stand it in a closed room," says Heinrichs.
This is another reason to shift your life to the streets.
A classic outgrowth of a delusional illness is the large baggage that the homeless women carry with them.
It is also typical that they are mobile at night.
They would then sleep in stages.
In overnight accommodation, these women often behave much more strenuously for everyone involved than the men.
It happens that they scream all night long.
Noise or strong physical odors are often a reason why these women have lost their homes.