By: Leann Lapp, Ph.D, C.Psych.
In the month leading up to World Mental Health Day on October 10, 2022, more and more messages about mental health will arise in popular media. Awareness campaigns such as World Mental Health Day or Bell Let’s Talk are helpful in that they push back against stigma and discrimination, which remain barriers to access and funding of mental health services. These campaigns educate the public about the prevalence of mental health issues. They have provided platforms for individuals to open up and connect with others about their struggles, thereby reducing the sense of isolation that often comes with mental health challenges.
At the same time, these campaigns fall short in several ways, including the perpetuation of narrow understandings of mental health, which translates into inadequate interventions and governmental action.
Mental health is often thought about as a problem within the individual (for example, wholly caused by a “chemical imbalance;” or stemming from a problem with how one is thinking about a situation). This is an understandable conceptualization given that this is usually how mental health is talked about in the media and by many experts within the medical field. Even within psychology, individual therapy is often the main recommendation in response to a mental health problem, which can inadvertently reify this idea. Individual factors, such as biology and cognition, absolutely play a role in mental health and many people benefit by addressing them.
This is only part of the story though. There is a plethora of research that describes how structural and social factors, such as class, housing, employment, and food access, have strong, bidirectional and sometimes causal relationships with mental health (e.g., Ridley et al., 2020). In other words, markers of poverty are not only associated with mental health problems but are found to cause them. Moreover, when poverty is addressed, mental health is improved.
Often, anti-poverty interventions are based on purely economic terms, but what the research shows is that anti-poverty measures should also be thought about as mental health treatment, as “medicine.” Further, treating mental health problems (through therapy or medication) should be thought of as an anti-poverty tool.
What many have been calling for is a broadening of how we think about the relationship between mental health and poverty, including within public awareness campaigns such as World Mental Health Day (e.g., Pathare et al., 2021). Doing so will better contextualize mental health struggles as more than an individual, private problem and hopefully increase public pressure for governments to address poverty as a way of fulfilling promises to address mental health. As several experts have already underscored (Pathare et al., 2021), scaling up mental health services will never be enough to meet the need, both because resources are limited and because these programs are usually ignoring societal and structural factors (such as poverty), which are a cause of mental health problems in the first place.
What can you do? Open up this conversation with those around you. Write to your local government to ask how they are alleviating poverty in order to treat mental health. Learn more about poverty and mental health (e.g., https://ontario.cmha.ca/documents/poverty-and-mental-illness/) and support local advocacy efforts (https://twitter.com/hpap_ontario; https://www.decentworkandhealth.org/)
References:
Pathare, S., Burgerss, R.A., & Collins, P.Y. (2021) World Mental Health Day: prioritise social justice, not only access to care, Lancet, 398(10314), doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02232-7
Ridley, M., Rao, G., Schilbach, F., & Patel, V. (2020) Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms, Science, 370(6522), https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay0214