Poverty and mental health present a classic “chicken and the egg” conundrum. Does mental illness hamper economic success? Or do financial failures threaten one’s mental well-being?
Those are the questions a multinational group of researchers sought to answer with a groundbreaking study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. And the short answer is, yes. The two aren’t just linked; they’re part of a causal relationship.
“This study indicates that certain mental health problems can make a person’s financial situation uncertain,” Amsterdam UMC psychiatrist Marco Boks said. “But conversely, we also see that poverty can lead to mental health problems.”
Its actually fascinating that theres a causative link. This article doesn’t even come close to diving into the other ways in which capitalism makes us mentally unwell eg: consumerism, attention economy, isolation, etc. I think we will look back on these years of capitalism just as we now look back on feudalism.
Important to note there’s a false positive and false negative rate.
It’s entirely possible it does and the study simply never picked it up. Or it’s possible wealth drives this higher and so the power needed to pick it up for poverty reasons is higher.
Wdym by this part?
In a statistical test the power is the ability of a test to detect a true effect.
If you have a sample of N and a type of test, you can say “if there’s a real effect, it has to be this big to for this test to find it 80% of the time”.
Studies use power to plan their sample sizes, but power is also influenced by the variables you’re measuring. If two groups are very similar, you need more people to find a difference, so the same test is said to have lower power.
So what I mean here is that if both wealth and poverty increase anorexia, then it’s more difficult to demonstrate that poverty causes it, because more people have it overall.
It just means it’s harder to show a statistical relationship.
That makes sense. Thank you for the thorough explanation. Did you review the data and notice that anomaly, or are you just saying its possible, in general?
I did not, no, just speculation
Fair enough. I would hope that the researchers controlled for this