Poverty is a ubiquitous challenge to the daily lives of its victims. It forces individuals to “scrape by” and make satisficing life choices due to paucity of alternatives. From replacing wholesome food with inferior alternatives and skipping meals, to self-medicating and using narcotics to escape reality, poverty makes basic human needs seem like privileges and causes existential competitions that leave huge mental scars. The physical ravages of poverty are easy to discern. Homelessness, illiteracy, low Human Development Indices (HDI), food insecurity, malnourishment and low life expectancy tell the stories of the poor rather eloquently. So eloquent are these physical and physiological manifestations that they easily distract from the most profound consequence and at times, cause of poverty; mental ill-health.
The poverty-mental health symbiosis is so profound that at times it is difficult to differentiate the ravages of abject destituteness from those of some debilitating mental health challenges. The poverty-mental health relationship is so overwhelmingly negative that not a single scientific claim exists to show if there is any desirable culmination of poverty for health (mental and physical). However, let us consider the dissuasive ramifications of the poverty-mental health symbiosis.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1995 declared poverty as the most prolific cause of suffering and needless death all around the world, with mental health distresses prominent among its direct causes and effects. One in four adults and one in ten children worldwide are said to experience mental health problems in any given year. Hence, the need for an understanding of the social-epidemiological relationship between poverty and mental illnesses cannot be gainsaid.
It is reported that poverty is both a consequence and cause of mental health to the extent that poverty and lack of material conditions is implicated as the only second to physiological and parental factors as risk factors for mental illnesses according to Elliot, in 2015. In essence, poverty is the maturational eventuation of mental health challenges that can also be due to poverty; such as problem drinking, problem gambling, homelessness, untreated/undiagnosed mental and physiological illnesses and sexually transmitted infections.
Poverty, just like mental health, is multidimensional and there is sufficient empirical evidence that links one form of poverty or the other with a form of psychiatric condition or the other. Job losses and other consequences of declining income have been found to precede episodes of mental illnesses. To this end, a 2019 report in Indonesia documented how a reduction in socioeconomic
activities among agrarian communities preceded a spike in rates of suicide and depression. Ditto for a developing country like Nigeria that emerged as the poverty capital of the world in recent times.
Further arguments can be made in line with the obvious relationships between poverty and maladaptive behaviors such as truancy, youth recalcitrance, substance use and other graver consequences such as the increased risk of mortality and vulnerability to life-threatening illnesses and psychiatric disorders.
Precisely, the intricacy of the poverty-mental illness symbiosis justifies the need to further ponder upon how specific characteristics of poverty aggravate threats to individual and community mental health. For one, poverty hinders access to those facilities that should mitigate the development of mental disorders, such as hospitals, social care and medication, and increase the likelihood by up to two-fold according to a 2019 study by Hastings and others.
Considering the most popular mental health distress, depression and its coterminous conditions such as suicide ideation and attempts, some of its major causes are poverty related. Such factors as job losses, loss of earnings and inability to meet major social milestones are both causes of depression and effects of depression. Another manifestation of this symbiosis is in the marriage between subpar environmental conditions and life stressors that are associated with poverty, such as poor nutrition, poor environmental conditions (overcrowding, noise and air pollutions), limited access to medical care and a robust social support system, and mental illnesses.
Some of these conditions provide both the initial motivations for experimental drug use, and increases the likelihood of individuals succumbing to self-injurious behaviours that can pose dire consequences for mental health. It is apt that interventions for the mentally ill and vulnerable populations should encompass programs that understand the extent to which poverty is a barrier to health promotion among the poor.
References
Elliott, I. June 2016. Poverty and Mental Health: A review to inform the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Anti-Poverty Strategy. London: MHF.Hastings, P D., et al. 2019. Predicting psychosis-spectrum diagnoses in adulthood from social behaviors and neighborhood contexts in childhood. Cambridge University Press 32:2
Bio:
Saheed Olayinka Bello studies Psychology (Personality and Social) at the University of Ibadan, and works as Grants, Research and Learning Associate at Sozo Networks. In 2020, his unpublished novel “The Daughter of Clerambault” was a finalist for the Quramo Writer’s Prize, 2020. His core interests are teaching, writing and research. He is a 32-year-old resident of Ibadan; where he works and schools, and Kaduna; where he writes and volunteers as a facilitator of social inclusion for vulnerable social groups such as persons living with disabilities, the homeless and other socially disadvantaged categories.
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