How Poverty Effects Mental Health
According to Poverty USA, in 2018, 38 million people were living in poverty, 16% are children, and 64% are Native American, Black, or Hispanic. With that comes the stress of being food or housing insecure. 11% or 14 million households had difficulty providing enough food for members of their family. The impacts of poverty have many effects on a person's life, Poor mental health being one of them.
Melanie Funchess, Director of Community Engagement at the Mental Health Association in Rochester, NY, works a lot with minority youth living in urban environments and the impact poverty has on them mentally. She says, “In our community, things like community violence, having a fire; those are things we all think about as trauma. But what I’ve talked about and can also be traumatic, is things like being food insecure. It's something that makes you scared if you don't know where your next meal is coming from; your frightened, and it changes the way you see and trust in the world. People should be able to eat.”
According to Childrenssociety.org, 1 in 5 children living in poverty feels like a failure, compared to one in seven of their more affluent peers. Funchess shared the analogy, “If I took a baseball bat and hit you in your leg, no one would ask you why you were limping. People have taken baseball bats to these people’s neighborhoods, to their very psyche, and they wonder why they are mentally limp. You don’t have to get shot; you just have to live in a neighborhood that has been deemed inherently unsafe. When these kids act out in school, people call them resistant, defiant, bad, and so this whole trajectory of things happen. So there's a whole other thing like racial disparities in the way people are diagnosed…. particularly black and brown children in the urban environment. It's a thing that we've got to change, we've got to change who we look at children and what messages we send to them and what we feed them emotionally mentally and spiritually.”
People living in poverty practically face financial challenges when it comes to getting the help they need. Funchess said, “It doesn’t matter how much money you have, but if something doesn't exist, you can't get it then say you're on Medicare assistance or you're poor you're dependent on the public mental health system. Where you go to the clinics and see people who are normally employed right out of school, and they don't have enough life experience yet, and the demands put on them are so tough that it wears them out. So it's hard because these people develop a therapeutic relationship, and then the therapist leaves them, and they have to start all over with a new persona. That kind of behavior sways people away from getting treatment”.
According to Funchess, there are other considerations insurance companies forget about as well, like “is there an African Muslim therapist on a panel? Because some things are directly related to islamophobia going on that challenges the mental health of people of the Islamic faith, you need somebody that shares your faith to understand and provide responsive care. But insurance companies are saying they see all the people the same, so they don't think they are needed in the panel then people have to private pay, and not many people can afford to (do that)”.
Lastly, Funchess said that we spend a lot of time focusing on reducing risk factors, and they are important to a point. She says that "many risk factors are systematic and created by structures and systems” far beyond her reach. For things to change, we need to focus on making sure people growing up in these high-risk environments have proper protective factors in place and reduce the number of poverty people are facing in this country.