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Mental Illness and Poverty: Does One Cause the Other?

By John M. Grohol, PsyD
Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Mental Illness and Poverty: Does One Cause the Other?

It has been a chicken-and-egg question for decades: Does the misery of poverty breed mental illness, or does the burden of mental illness cast people down into poverty? The two clearly tend to go together, but which causes which?

This week, a Massachusetts researcher published possibly the broadest study yet on the question, examining tens of thousands of hospital records statewide to see whether patients who were hospitalized for mental illness then “drifted down” to less affluent ZIP codes.

The study, which followed patients from 1994 through 2000, turned up surprisingly little such downward drift, said the researcher, Christopher G. Hudson, a professor at Salem State College and expert in mental health policy.

So, he said, “the news here is that there is now increasingly strong evidence that socioeconomic status is indeed a very important dimension of mental illness, though obviously not the only dimension.”


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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 11 Mar 2005
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.

APA Reference
Grohol, J. (2005). Mental Illness and Poverty: Does One Cause the Other?. Psych Central. Retrieved on February 14, 2012, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2005/03/11/mental-illness-and-poverty-does-one-cause-the-other/

 

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