MENTAL ILLNESS AND HARD TIMES
Kenneth A. Polky, Executive Director
"The poorer one's socioeconomic conditions are, the higher one's
risk is for mental disability and psychiatric hospitalization.”
- Christopher G. Hudson, Ph.D.
Americans
who cannot find jobs are four times more likely to experience severe
mental-health issues (The National Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health
America, 2009). This not good news in view of current unemployment rates and
the estimated 1.8 million Americans who have already given up on finding a job.
“The massiveness of this problem has not yet descended on the American public,”
according to Dr. M. Harvey Brenner-- a John Hopkins University Professor who has
conducted extensive research linking unemployment to increases in physical and
psychological disorders.
Researchers have known for some
time that joblessness, poverty and mental illness are correlated. Numerous
studies since the 1930’s have shown that the lower a person's socioeconomic
status, the greater his chances of having a mental disorder. Yet determining
“which comes first”--poverty or mental illness, is difficult to sort out and the
relationship has long been assumed to be interactive.
A recently published seven-year
study of 34,000 individuals conducted by Dr. Christopher G. Hudson of Salem
State College suggests that poverty, acting through economic stressors such as
unemployment and lack of affordable housing, is more likely to precede mental
illness than the reverse. Dr. Hudson's data shows mental illness to be three
times as prevalent in low-income communities as in higher income ones. Past
studies have shown the rate to be anywhere from two to nine times higher in poor
communities.
Kelly Anthony, Ph.D., a
visiting assistant professor of social psychology at Wesleyan University
believes that particularly in the United States, “relative poverty and
dissatisfaction with one's lot in life compared to that of others correlate with
mental illness.”
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