Psychopathology and socioeconomic position: what can be done to break the vicious circle?

Excerpt

Socioeconomic circumstances are known to be associated with mental health since the seminal work conducted by Edward Jarvis in the State of Massachusetts in the United States in 1855, showing that persons belonging to socioeconomically deprived groups were disproportionately represented among those hospitalized in then-called ‘asylums’ [1]. Like many physicians and pioneer epidemiologists of his time, Jarvis primarily attributed the relationship between mental ill health and poverty to individuals’ innate flaws, which were thought to be amenable to change via “moral treatment”, but which were largely unavoidable. It followed that social inequalities in mental health were thought to be equally unavoidable. …