Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms
Name
Poverty Depression Anxiety.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
654.45 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e58185e1054d1e93d77676799ddf824e
Author(s)
Ridley, Matthew
Rao, Gautam
Schilbach, Frank
Patel, Vikram
Date Issued
December 2020
Journal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Ridley, Matthew et al. "Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms." Science 370, 6522 (December 2020): eaay0214 © 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Why are people who live in poverty disproportionately affected by mental illness? We review the interdisciplinary evidence of the bidirectional causal relationship between poverty and common mental illnesses-depression and anxiety-and the underlying mechanisms. Research shows that mental illness reduces employment and therefore income, and that psychological interventions generate economic gains. Similarly, negative economic shocks cause mental illness, and antipoverty programs such as cash transfers improve mental health. A crucial step toward the design of effective policies is to better understand the mechanisms underlying these causal effects.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay0214
