Tackling poverty and mental health – what we know and what we can do

 The UK is the world’s sixth largest economy, yet today 13 million (that’s 1 in 5 people) are living here in poverty. Given the daily struggle that people living in poverty experience life to be, it is perhaps not surprising that this review found that poverty increases the risk of mental health problems and is both a cause and consequence of mental ill health.

The 2015 Monitoring poverty and social exclusion report found that within the lowest socio-economic class, 26% of women and 23% of men were at a high risk of mental health problems. It is clear that there is much that we can do to prevent both mental health problems and poverty by tackling the root causes of both and by mitigating their impacts on individuals, families and communities. 

Iris Elliot 

Head of Policy and Research at the Mental Health Foundation. 

How many therapists working with the DWP will read this report?

How many counselling training establishments, whose students will practice on clients who are too poor to be able to choose private therapy, will read this report?

How many agencies who use counselling students to service the needs of their client base will read the report?

Listening to white working class views of neighbourhood, cohesion and change

Before you begin reading this do an image search for "White Working Class"

This is the first image that presents itself and the rest are fairly depressing.






The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is "an independent organisation working to inspire social change through research, policy and practice," and their site is well worth spending some time browsing.


Here's one of their pieces of research on White Working Class communities, completed in 2011. How might these findings have changed in the last 5 years? UKIP is defunct after it's moment of glory in 2012 when 691 UKIP candidates in the May 2012 local elections. They won 13% of the vote. Many of these voters used to be traditional Labour voters; pre-2012 were they voting for Socialist society values or for their own individual prosperity?

Whatever the case, for many people "WhiteWorking Class" has become polite shorthand for unemployed, unemployable, ignorant, racist, scrounger. This research suggests something different.

". . . rather than the popular portrayal of a feckless mass, annexed in dysfunctional housing estates, our research paints a much more nuanced reality. People were diverse in terms of ethnicity, income and tenure and emphasised values of hard work, reciprocity and mutual support.

"Racism is never acceptable. This report demonstrates that it is not the domain of the white working class either. Extremist parties have been shunned by residents. These are super-resilient places, with people who simply want to be heard, valued and treated fairly rather than forgotten. Hopefully this is a message that will be heard and acted on. And the people I grew up with can stop being stigmatised and left to feeling 'last in line'. "