By Jan Matthews

In 1855, Edward Jarvis wrote that “the pauper class furnishes, in ratio to its numbers, 64 times as many cases of insanity as the independent class.” In the nearly 150 years that have since passed, researchers have continued to investigate the relationship between poverty and mental disorder, drawing into their analyses, arguments and speculations such issues as neighbourhood deprivation, residential instability, social capital, social isolation, social disorder and lack of control, and ethnicity. Although the work is far from complete, much light has been shed.   

Dozens of researchers, whose work will be reviewed shortly, have shown that low-income neighbourhoods contribute to residents’ feelings of distress, depression, anxiety, conduct disorders in children, even psychosis. In fact, the findings are so compelling that neighbourhood deprivation harms mental health that governments have conducted randomized controlled experiments to test whether moving people out of poor neighbourhoods will improve their mental health. While the results seem promising indeed, the findings are not resoundingly positive, indicating that while much can be done at a neighbourhood level to improve mental health, there is still a great deal to be understood. No social experiment can be called a failure, though, since finding no association is often as interesting as finding a positive link. That is certainly what has happened in the research on neighbourhood and mental health, which began so long ago with Edward Jarvis’ conclusion.

Source: Introduction from "Can mental illness be mitigated by improving poor neighbourhoods?" Submitted in partial fulfillment of a master of arts degree, Dalhousie University School of Health and Human Performance, Dec. 10, 2004. Click here for the full paper.