The Relationship Between Mental Illness and Poverty

Poverty and mental health live on the same street. One in every four individuals with mental illness, or 9.8 million American adults, live below the poverty line. This is compared to one in ten American adults overall living in poverty. It is clear that either mental illness increases the odds of poverty or that poverty increases the odds of mental illness.

In what ways can mental illness cause poverty?

Education

A lack of higher education is positively correlated with a likelihood to experience poverty. Only 5% of individuals with a Bachelor’s degree or higher will live below the poverty line, while 35% of individuals with less than a high school diploma will experience poverty. For those who graduate high school but do not pursue secondary education, almost one in five will live in poverty. 

People who experience mental illness are less likely to graduate from a higher education program compared to their peers. Almost half of individuals with schizophrenia and three quarters of people living with bipolar disorder will drop out of college, leaving them at an increased risk of poverty.

Unemployment

This may sound obvious, but an inability to secure or maintain employment is a major contributor to poverty. Workers with less employment options, such as highly specialized workers or low skilled workers may struggle to find opportunities to work and therefore have a decreased income, pushing them into poverty.

Even beyond the lower education rates, the symptoms and impacts of mental health conditions can further diminish the pool of accessible jobs, if an individual’s symptoms allow them to work at all. Approximately 45% of individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder are unemployed, and severe PTSD symptoms are also linked with an inability to work.

Discrimination

Poverty is heavily related to racial and ethnic backgrounds. While the overall U.S children’s poverty rate is 21%, the rate of poverty among black and hispanic children are 46% and 40% respectively– roughly double. 

Although mental illness affects all racial and ethnic communities at equal rates, the reported numbers of diagnosed mental illness vary across communities. For example, while bipolar disorder is equally as likely to occur in black versus white individuals, black patients are more likely to go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and receive inadequate or even harmful treatment. This healthcare discrimination can lead symptoms to go untreated, making it more difficult for members of ethnic and racial minorities to receive education or sustain employment. 

Conclusion

In these ways, mental illness makes individuals more likely to experience the challenges that push many Americans into poverty and keep them there. It’s important to note however that the inverse is also likely true: poverty can potentially lead to mental health adversities.

So how should nonprofits approach this? Understanding that poverty and mental illness exist in a cycle with one another, nonprofit organizations should seek to ensure that their mental health services are poverty-aware. 

A holistic approach tackling both problems is most likely to improve outcomes for your community.

As always, thank you for your part in saving the world,

Usorum

We’re Usorum. We create peer-to-peer and bottom-up conversations for nonprofit communities. We do this by hosting 'brainstorms' for nonprofit organizations, where they can ask their community to engage digitally around a common topic. For those nonprofits who want to, the brainstorm can also serve as a fundraising and a volunteer recruitment tool. Our second offer is an ongoing digital forum for the communities serviced across nonprofits, with a culture of people directly supporting each other and providing their techniques on adversity into a shared lived experience library. If you believe in community engagement, check us out at Usorum.com