Mental Health And Poverty

Dependant on our internal landscape, individual circumstance, and our particular communities, we are impacted in positive and negative ways. As actors in group sociological dynamics, stressors and supportive resources have the potential to affect our mental health. In general terms, education levels, poverty and wealth, race and ethnicity, religion and culture, interpersonal relationships, demographics as well as gender, all play key activation roles in these microsocial systems. Personal mindset, perspective, and degrees of inner resilience integral to our psychographic maps, offer us both mediation and moderation in managing our lives.
When we are resilient, we operate with an expanded range of emotional diversity which offers us the ability

Constant exposure to severely stressful events, dangerous living conditions, exploitation, and poor health in general all contribute to their greater vulnerability. The lack of access to affordable treatment makes the course of illness more severe and debilitating, leading to a vicious circle of poverty and mental health disorders. Again, however, it is important to note that there are individuals who are resilient and use their situations of poverty to their own advantage as a spur point to move forward in their lives. Darrell L. Hudson, PhD, assistant professor in the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, USA has stated “Mental health affects people’s social and economic opportunities, and in turn, social and economic opportunity affects mental health,” Hudson said. “For example, people dealing with mental health challenges are less likely to complete school, and low educational achievement is strongly associated with lower earnings. Low earnings and unemployment affect people’s ability to seek and to afford treatment for mental

Individuals may feel very happy and demonstrate gratitude and graciousness within the wealthy lifestyle, expressing their humility by giving back to the community. Very frequent in this schematic are feelings that there is ‘not enough’ which fuels a constant comparison with others and feelings of competition. Such individuals will experience this psychological paradigm rooted in feelings of low self-esteem, self-worth, and insecurity. This is the basis of most Western societies very ingrained with consumerism, where individuals feel as though they must ‘consume’ something including food, items, and work an extravagant number of work hours to ‘keep up with the neighbours’.
In most Western urban areas, there are exists a plethora of social support and resources. Despite this, however, an individual may feel supported or misplaced. Depending on the mindset, an individual may have a good ‘fit’ with organized support structures or not feel understood at all. Differences in race, gender, religion, or even ethnicity and culture can create schisms within support systems that precipitate individual members of the community to ‘fall out’ of the system and leave them feeling