Low parental income in childhood linked to increased risk of mental disorders
doi.org
doi.org
1. The ability to delay gratification
2. Conscientiousness
3. A belief in free will
4. Being in an open network
5. Childhood adversity
6. Avid reading
7. Past success
8. Grit
If we work backwards and imagine persons who have fewer of these traits, it becomes easier to imagine that they'd also be more likely to have mental disorders of increasing severity. A lack of grit and lack of conscientiousness could be signs of depressive personalities, for example. Or not believing in free will and not having an open network may stem from paranoia.
My takeaway is simply that social programs may want to focus more on proactive measures to address mental health of children in lower socio-economic circumstances.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/briannawiest/2018/04/23/8-trait...
When I read these studies, I'm thinking that this "fact" is disputed and low access to resource may have positive effects - which is ridiculous.
A kind of second order implication of this is that it's more important to research the problem than to solve it (I know you need to understand the problem first, but I think it is not that complicated).
Being critical in a scientific context shouldn’t be wrong. True, it might be hard to balance.
> it's more important to research the problem than to solve it
Yes, I’d say research is the necessary first step.
Human intuition can always be wrong. Regardless, the results of a research can provide useful pointers about next steps.
1. People with mental disorders, tend to have lower paying jobs, and also kids with mental disorders.
2. We must fix income inequality to protect the kids.
3. Low income people should not be allowed to have children.
4. People who will have kids with mental disorders can usually predict that by using their income as a marker (this one kinda breaks the laws of physics but whatever)
I'm sure there's more. But just reading the ultra left and ultra right interpretations in this thread immediately killed my creativity.
They adjusted for parental mental disorders.
Maybe it's a good thing you don't get too creative...
My parents immigrated to a country with basically nothing and barely spoke English. I can't imagine what their lives were like, how hard it must have been. I was raised below the poverty line and had free lunch well into high school. They always told me they did everything they did because they wanted me to have a better life. It worked. I am amazed at how far there were able to climb, and it gave me the confident to achieve so much more. My mom routinely calls me a dreamer because I wanted to make six figures. In her world, this is huge, she doesn't understand the world like I do. And, that's okay, she did the best she could, so I achieve so much more. And, hopefully, one day, my child can achieve things I can only dream of.
Life is unfair. The way I see it is every one of us was dropped into a race that we didn't ask to be in. Some of us got dropped further along in the race, some of us got dropped further behind. Is it unfair? Fuck yea it is, but what are you going to do? Stay there and complain? Or are you gonna get busy running.
Yea, it's out of touch to tell someone with broken legs to walk it off. But, if someone got the wind knock out of them. That's perfectly fine advice.
In fact, I hope and believe the majority of mental illness cases are not serious. Like, most physical cases. It's just harder to see, so people have a harder time properly categorizing it. Which is damaging to a person psyche. If someone has a sprain ankle, but thinks they have cancer. Imagine the unnecessary trauma and hopelessness the person is experiencing.
Who are you to decide the seriousness of a mental illness?
Personally, I'd rather hope and strive to reduce the amount of people suffering from mental disorders rather then redefine them so they aren't "serious." Everyone should be entitled to the "resources and advantages" that prevent illness, not just the rich.
I'm simply saying, no matter your situation, do the best you can because that's what you have control over. Also, it's easier to change yourself, than to change the world. I mean if you're fighting to change the world, more power to you. I hope you succeed and make the world a fairer place.
Again, you're telling this to people with mental disorders like schizophrenia. They don't necessarily have control over their disorder, and are unable to change themselves alone.
This is why it seems like you're shaming people. You both belittled their issues and are telling them to just get over them, like they haven't been trying all along.
As someone who has dealt with serious, chronic health issues for a decade, I truly hate this attitude.
I don't necessarily have full control over my health issues, but I'll be damned if you tell me I am unable to take actions to change myself and my situation.
Yes, I much prefer messages that emphasize my personal agency, which your well-intentioned message actively denies.
This is a tight-rope to walk: sick people have limitations and one should acknowledge them, but repeatedly asserting their utter helplessness is also a form of shaming and encourages them to stop trying.
They're trying to explain to relatively healthy and privileged people that blaming sick people for trying and failing is extremely unlikely to help them.
Do your chronic health issues alter the way your mind operates? If you believe that some external agent is inserting thoughts into your mind, how do you take control of such a situation?
That's an extreme example, but such issues are common with mental disorders. When your mind itself is ill, willpower alone doesn't necessarily cut it.
I can't speak towards schizophrenia specifically, but you work through mental health like any other obstacle: if it turns out to be an impassable mountain, then go around it.
This is what I hear in GGP's message, and it strongly resonates with my own experience.
What can be done to work around self-deception?
Can you imagine your situation being a little worse, so that no matter how hard you tried you couldn't find a path around it? Some people will end up in untenable situations, if you want a clearcut example consider a coma patient.
A couple of thoughts: of course some people will be in a hole so deep they cannot dig themselves out. But I suspect that is rarer than you expect (look at how we went from mental illness in general, to schizophrenia, now to coma patients).
Unless you’re intimately familiar with someone’s situation, how can you judge?
I’ve found it more helpful to focus on how one can succeed, whether for myself or loved ones.
I think it's relatively common for people with mental illness to end up in a situation they themselves can't recover from, and my examples were hyperbolic as you seemed to deny the very existence of such people. They generally recover with help from those close to them, medical experts, and government support.
>Unless you’re intimately familiar with someone’s situation, how can you judge?
I don't need intimacy with anyone's situation, all I said was that some portion of the 30,000 incidents of mental illness could not control their disorders and would need help.
>I’ve found it more helpful to focus on how one can succeed, whether for myself or loved ones
I'm guessing my post was misunderstood, as here you seem to be trying to help others rather than forcing them to accomplish it by willpower alone.
This one is offering the much more woke opinion that life is like a patronizing disability porn hollywood movie that disordered people just can't change themselves alone. They need the help of the audience self-insert to unlock their special disabled potential.
You are saying that it's no good to advice people with severe mental health issues to do better if they are poor (fair), whereas the article says early poverty increases the chances of having these disorders (also fair). The causation in two arguments is reversed, however (poor -> mental disorder, mental disorder -> poor), and this is where the OP's argument fits, I think... you become more likely to develop mental disorders because of certain aspects of poverty (malnutrition? bad habits/lifestyle? etc.), however for someone who believes in personal responsibility, that may be to a significant degree because you "didn't do better".
Yes, you are. “Most mental disorders are not that serious” is passive-aggressively stating that those suffering from something you consider to “not be serious” just aren’t working hard enough; that they’re lazy, not disabled.
The truth is, you can work as hard as you want, but if you’re not lucky as well, that work won’t propel you forward.
https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I <- Veritasium on luck vs hard work
Why write all this when you clearly don't know much about psychiatry and mental illness? This is some high lvl Dunning–Kruger posting.
Then your understanding of mental illness is very poor. For example, from Wikipedia, "In 2015, ... [suicide] was the second leading cause of death for young people aged 15 to 34 and the third leading cause of death for those between the ages of 10 and 14." And, in comparison to treatments for common cancers, the successful treatment rate for many common mental illnesses is often quite low.
In that scenario money is a correlated variable, and the root cause is somewhere else.
"Adjustment for parental mental illness also likely represented an under-adjustment as most parental psychiatric disorders that were treated in outpatient clinics (without inpatient admission) were not recorded, and all of those that were treated in primary care (without inpatient or outpatient treatment) were unregistered. Furthermore, although register-based mental disorder diagnoses have been shown to have good validity [33, 34], not all mental disorders have been validated."
So if they exclude parental outpatient treated disorders, and exclude parental primary care treated disorders, all that seems to be left over is the rounding errors of self diagnosis and stays in mental hospitals, which would seem to be a huge issue for the conclusion.
The conclusion section doesn't seem to relate to the results section and discussion section, so that's weird.
Can you describe what this means in the context of someone who has schizophrenia?
I can't speak from the context of someone who has schizophrenia because as far as I know I don't have it. So I'll speak more generally.
"Get busy running" is a mindset. It was a reference to "Get busy living" from Shawshank Redemption (Great movie). I don't know your situation, or how horrible it is to live with schizophrenia. I just hope there are still things you can control in your life. No matter how small or minuscules they seem, focus on that. Focus on the things you can do better.
There is nothing wrong with wanting help or helping other people. However, from the perspective of an individual(who is suffering/disadvantaged) it's a safer bet to focus on things you can control. So, yes, I am putting the ownership of your life, in your own hands. Isn't that empowering? I find it is. Also, it doesn't have to be alone. Maybe, the way to help yourself is you find people that can help you. Allowing people to help and accepting help is big.
No one asked for life. You're just given it. All the beauty and suffering. I said a race, but there is no finish line. You try or you don't. To everyone who is trying to make the world a better place. Thank you. I support you. I want the same thing. I'm trying to help in my own way. You might not agree, but that's okay.
lol I hate how philosophical and cheesy I sound, but that's what I feel.
“Just work a little harder young jimmy, you can be successful despite not eating enough and having little parental guidance for the first 15 years of your life!” I did it just fine!
You see it as a race because you won. Many people are just trying to stay alive, they can’t even conceptualize competing.
> Young Jimmy can’t pull himself up by his bootstraps when dad is in jail and mom works 12 hour shifts at McDonald’s. School feeds him breakfast and lunch.
I don't see the difference. It sounds like Jimmy is starting at the point the OP's parents did, not OP.
This is totally not what davidn20 wrote.
This is literally “pick yourself up by your bootstraps”. Get busy running is not a thing underprivileged kids can do.
Undeprivileged kids can try harder or less hard, same as privileged kids can try harder or less hard. The starting position makes a huge difference. Whether one tries or not also makes a huge difference.
At its core it’s the difference between believing anyone can succeed and believing outside factors are much more impactful than working hard. In America it is often times a conservative b liberal mindset.
It's a thing privileged kids can afford not to do. Underprivileged kids absolutely have to get busy running to get anywhere.
“Get Busy” sounds good when there is opportunity to improve. My point is that many people who are in a situation where working harder does not result in success. They do not have the tools, knowledge, access, etc to turn hard work into success.
The OP had three advantages that many kids today dont: he had at least two parents. Those parents had no contact with the criminal justice system and were themselves in good health (evidenced by the fact they were allowed to immigrate). And his parents were probably allowed to work. Many young kids today dont have two parents. Many young kids have one or more parents who are not properly citizens, who dont enjoy the priviledge of being allowed to work legally.
Today is not yesturday. Poor kids today face much greater challenges than those of the past. Direct comparisons of situations are almost always apples and oranges.
To believe this requires a baffling degree of historical ignorance.
It makes the poor more productive.
You just have to adjust monetary policy to maintain that status quo.
Of course, the opposite of that is true as well.
Ultimately the race isn't all about merit but also politics.
Also OP never says that he won the race. He is hoping his children will do better than him. I don’t think anybody ever “wins”. You only trade something for something else.
This is the ideology I was arguing against since it comes purely from a view of someone successful. It assumes everyone is equally capable of “doing something”. But if you struggle to find your next meal, you can’t do anything besides.. Try to find food. There is no “doing something about it” because you are so disadvantaged that regardless of your action it’s impossible to escape.
In some cases you didn’t eat enough as a child and your brain is literally incapable of escaping. And you’ve never seen someone escape, so it’s not a known possibility.
From my perspective op won the race because he/she makes 100k so objectively isn’t poor and doesn’t have comparable hurdles.
an outcome doesn't have to be deserved in order to be obvious.
They don't deserve it, of course, but it's obvious that someone with less resources available to them will have worse health. They will have to work more hours to meet their basic needs, and the money left over will be used at places available to them -- far from the best the world has to offer.
It's not something anyone deserves, it's a consequence of limited care being prioritized by economy. It's a damn shame, but that's pretty largely applicable to all facets of living life.
Higher quality lifestyle/housing/food/travel, less work hours, less stress, better medical care and opportunities to seek care leads to better health versus someone with none of those advantages.
It's a well known phenomena across the health spectrum, and it's nice that it was quantified and linked in yet another way as it was in the article.
Blaming individuals for a lack of success when the deck is stacked against them is likely to lead to more mental health issues, not more success.
And it is not a fact of life. It can be changed.
Ultimately this is a moral problem. You either care or you don't. If you don't - well, fine.
But don't complain when your family is being bankrupted and/or made homeless when you in turn receive "limited care being prioritized by the economy."
What is not obvious is that being poor in your childhood will, specifically, increase your risk of mental disorders. I would probably expect a poor kid to get less access to qualified education and, ultimately, be poorer for the rest of their life with respect to their richer peers. But not to experience mental disorders.
Keep in mind this study was talking about mental disorders. Many of those mental disorders will interfere will inhibit a person's ability to "get busy running."
It is also worth considering that this paper is not about a race with a meaningful measure of success, regardless of how you define success. There are measured outcomes, whether a person ends up with a mental disorder or not, based upon preconditions. It is not even clear whether training more and running faster will even help a person reach the finish line (which is presumably good mental health throughout life).
No it was not because one can name disorders like autism spectrum disorder where diagnosis is more likely with high socioeconomic status. In general this conclusion isn't that obvious because one would think a richer child would have more access to the medical resources to get diagnosed.
This article is showing what other children needs. We should help them just like we helped you.
The irony here is that they couldn’t even feed you and you say:
> It worked.
A pernicious issue in the US is mental health, even with "good" health care plans, is quite rationed. So US citizens are heavily incentivized to avoid seeking help. In the US, this might exacerbate the effect the Danish study identified.
From a pragmatic national economic perspective, I'd rather have someone with varying degrees of mental health challenges operating at below their productive potential, with some glimmer of hope of future recovery and/or self-maintenance, and consuming some fraction of mental health care workers' staff time, than absolute zero productive delivery, and causing net negative drain on resources from them eventually lashing out and us cleaning up after the mess from lashing out. There are huge ramifications to this kind of posture, not all good, so it isn't all roses, but I think developed nations are sufficiently advanced enough to shoulder this kind of burden, and I come at this from a kind of "no man left behind" type philosophy about it.
That's a very surprising result to me, and I wonder if something like the private practice omission might explain that one small portion of the data.
I wonder what the results are in societies where the grandparents regularly take part in child rearing, where kids have unstructured and unsupervised play with their neighbors, and where food is more often prepared for a larger community instead of a single family unit. In the USA these "priveledges" cost money, but they used to be free. I'm sure they also radically affect mental health.
Income inequality has and continues to cause detriment for societies.
If you raised everyone's income above a minimum threshold, that would reduce income inequality by almost any measure.
Gini coefficient (the most commonly used inequality measure) effectively uses logarithms in its calculations: so raising incomes away from zero is the most effective way of reducing inequality by this metric (and most other metrics, and, I think, in most people's minds).
[Edit: are y'all down-voting because I said something technically wrong, or because you disagree in your mind? I'd like to know.]
My vote is, of course. But I'm genuinely curious to hear the counter argument.
Bezos's wealth is already effectively unbounded. He has the same wealth as ~50% of the population of United States altogether. That won't immediately change if you uplift poor people's income (since income is not wealth). Why is it important to consider his right to get even richer?
Because it has a correlation with making a lot of other peoples' lives better. For example, I needed to do some repairs two days ago, and ordered the parts necessary from Amazon, and received the parts yesterday. I didn't have to spend 2 hours driving somewhere to get those parts. That extra 2 hours is a benefit to my life. Amazon, in aggregate, has saved me a great deal of time. Another benefit Amazon provides is selection - I can find much more exactly what I want, rather than accepting whatever the store has.
It's a benefit that online shopping has provided, which Amazon has monopolized, partly via suppressing competition and exploiting labour (which society has to pay for in other ways).
25 years later it's easy to assume that online shopping was always like it is today. No way. Nobody even conceived of what it has become. I remember, for example, when ordering by mail meant "allow 3 to 6 weeks for delivery". I'm still astonished by next day delivery - which Amazon created and made ordinary.
For another example, Sears used to be the king of mail order. Famously, you could even mail order a house! It was delivered on a pallet and you got to put it together. I used to buy lots from the Sears mail order catalog. It was fun just thumbing through it.
Amazon wiped it off the map, from a garage.
That it absurd. If you double the wealth and income of every person on the world, nothing changes. Same gini coefficient, same poverty.
The sum of all money and other financial objects might change in numerical value but still represents the current amount of goods and land that exist on the planet.
That's what I wrote.
That statement is obviously false. The US and Haiti have about the same gini coefficient.
> If you double the wealth and income of every person on the world, nothing changes.
The commenter surely meant doubling material wealth (as you put it, the "current amount of goods and land that exist on the planet"), not just some abstract numerical value.
> That statement is obviously false. The US and Haiti have about the same gini coefficient.
I'm comparing before the doubling and after, not across different countries. facepalm
> The commenter surely meant doubling material wealth
That post clearly reads "What if you could increase low end incomes".
If you could increase them more than you would be able to by redistributing wealth, then I think you should. But I can't think of any scenario where this is evenly remotely close to being the case. In practice we have plentiful but finite resources, and by far the easiest and most practical way to increase lower end incomes would be to redistribute our existing wealth.
> Excessive redistribution somehow leads to less cake production.
Indeed, but emphasis on excessive. I'd argue that we currently have an excessive lack of redistribution which is also leading to less cake production.
I don't think this follows. Yes we can make better use of resources, but there's a limit. And given the huge wealth differentials (two or three orders of magnitude) it's feasible and even likely that that limit is lower than the amount of wealth available for redistribution.
Increasing income does not have to be increasing the number of dollars you make either. What if you made the same money, but it went a longer way? Like you could get cheaper healthcare, but good food for less, or have any other show up at your doorstep in two business days?
I'm not saying our system is perfect, and I actually agree that this is probably a good time to look at redistribution of wealth. But I think limiting others' creativity because of our own lack of imagination is a terrible idea that makes us all worse off.
Resources are infinite under free markets. For example, software. There is great wealth in software creation, yet it does not exist in the physical world. Even for physical things, they can be re-arranged to make the new arrangement more valuable.
Bad decisions may (may) lead you to financial ruin, but financial ruin is not an indicator of bad decisions.
How much influence that has I’m not as sure about, but I would be shocked if there were zero or negative correlation.
There's a study that does hint the converse is true.
> Childhood poverty: Experiencing or growing up in poverty affects people’s lifelong decision-making style. People living in poverty make decisions focused on coping with present stressful circumstances, often at the expense of future goals.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/PBS/Research/Research-archive/How-pove...
For example:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-br...
https://review.chicagobooth.edu/behavioral-science/2018/arti...
What should the minimum income threshold be that puts reasonable guarantees on desired societal outcomes?
Why should relative levels of income be determinative rather than absolute levels of income?
The problem doesn't just exist, it's very obvious and pressing.
And ultimately it leads to huge distortions in democracy and policy at every level.
There's a good case to be made for the assertion that any economy that prioritises the wealth of a very small number of individuals over eliminating poverty for most of the population is fundamentally and unavoidably unstable. At best it will be unable to operate as a functional democracy and at worst it becomes an oligarchy where inherited privilege trumps any real prospect of social mobility.
The fact that the US scores very poorly on objective measures of social mobility compared to more redistributive economies only reinforces this.
This implies that people become wealthy by taking money from others. This is not correct, people become wealthy (in a free market system) by creating wealth. The money supply automatically increases because of that.
There isn't a monopoly on money - anyone can create wealth.
A free market is an approximation of value at the best of times: at best it represents people's estimation of that value given the information available to them. But in real societies it's not even that good, it's distorted by power differentials. One of the most significant being wealth disparities. In a hypothetical society where everyone had equal wealth then a market does distribute wealth to at those people who others think are providing value. But as soon as there's a wealth disparity then people with more wealth have proportionally say over where money gets distributed and thus money accrues to what those people consider valuable. The greater the wealth disparities that exist the further away this gets from distributing money to those who truly create wealth.
Yet it seems that the overwhelming bulk of products and services in the marketplace are designed for broad market appeal, not just to 1% of the population. For example, in Seattle, I don't even know of any stores that target the 1%.
McDonald's is one of the biggest (or the biggest) restaurateur, yet it clearly is targeted at pretty much everyone.
It would be interesting to see a similar study in a country where being in the bottom quintile also meant being absolutely poor.
I'm not sure this is a valid (in a Popperian sense) QUESTION.
Income is interrelated to a motherload of other population factors that interact in complex ways. Things can be both cause and effect. You live in a cheap neighborhood because you're broke. Maybe this low income neighborhood or has worse jobs or worse schools. Maybe crime is high. Stress. Mental health. Relationship consequences. Financial consequences Etc.
These things are complex in practice and can span communities/societies.
I don't think we can understand these things fully or mechanically. There's plenty of evidence, theory, and common sense that such problems stack. No theory or measurement is definitive, IMO. Weather you theorize about the world or deal in data, you're probably not distinguishing between income and income inequality well. They're too tightly interlinked in practice.
That said, I doubt that middle-quintile income groups in much poorer countries than Denmark exhibit the same mental health patterns as bottom quintile groups in Denmark. So... "income threshold, not income inequality" probably isn't true in that sense.
I wouldn't jump to the opposite conclusion either, that absolute income thresholds don't matter either. I just don't think we can reach conclusions about social issues in perfect isolation from each other. Society doesn't work that way, so it's hard to reach conclusions about it that way.
In practice, income and income inequality within societies exist in an interlinked way. We don't generally affect one without the other. We can't easily study/measure it either.
Parsed as a strict-sih Popperian question, it just ends up being a moot question. Maybe in a human petri dish it's possible that mental health is totally unrelated to income. Does that even mean anything?
The study does not attempt to answer the why. Speculation is kind of fruitless.
No one is denying that income inequality doesn’t exist.
No casual link has been established. Try it the other way 'round, it makes more sense.
Given this study was done in a place with free healthcare it's hard to say how much causality there is here.
Background: I find it highly plausible that low parental income causes increased risk of mental disorders. I also think it is extremely important to know whether low parental income causes mental disorders, and to have a good estimate of the effect size.
So I read through this and of course down at the end we get:
"It is important to note that rather than investigating the causal effect of parental income per se, we conceptualised parental income as an indicator for an array of measured and unmeasured monetary and non-monetary indices of family’s social environments that are typically interrelated. As our results indicate, controlling for a range of covariates attenuates the relative risk estimates observed, but such estimates would still only constitute partial adjustments as it would never be possible to control for all relevant correlates, and therefore completely disentangle these non-monetary influences from the direct monetary impact."
The first sentence is true. Dropping the pompous gobbledegook, it says "we don't know if this is a correlation or a causal link". Yeah, that's what I expected.
The second sentence is just bullshit. "it would never be possible to control for all relevant correlates..." - sure, if you do crappy 1980s-style observational research that is all you'll ever get. Meanwhile, for the past, oh, twenty years or more, there have been people doing actual experiments to find out the causal effect of poor people getting more money. I mean, say what you like about Jefffrey Sachs but at least he knew to run an experiment.
How does the medical profession continually get away with this garbage social science? Are they stupid? Do they not understand that this work adds zero value? Or are they just pretending not to know about the alternatives - i.e. they're liars? Which is it? Stupid? Or liars?
Another piece of flagrant dishonesty is their recommendation: "Interventions to mitigate the disadvantages linked with low income, and better opportunities for upward socioeconomic mobility, are needed to reduce social inequality in mental health". OK, so you just admitted that you don't know whether low income causes mental health problems. But now apparently we need to fix low income so as to stop causing mental health problems. Which is it?
If you're a left wing person, God bless you. Now, how about producing some decent social science instead of this worthless garbage?
Edit: here's a review of the causal literature on cash transfers from 2016. It includes an entire chapter on health. Relevant quote:
"All studies included under question one – examining the effects of cash transfers on the selected outcomes – had to use either an experimental design (i.e. randomised control trial (RCT) or cluster-RCT)57 or a quasi-experimental design that relies on a credible control group." (They did allow for diff-in-diff, which isn't perfect, but at least they are talking about causality.)
https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-document...
Full article headline, for those who read the title and thought "... obviously?"