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Rising Need For Mental Healthcare Could Be Linked To Social Disadvantage

I strongly concur with Smith’s comment about mental healthcare: “There are logical explanations for rising levels of need.”1For some years, the demand for mental health treatments has risen nationally, across many diagnoses and the UK.2 Given that rates of mental disorders are generally higher in areas with deprivation and disadvantage, starting in children and continuing until older age, the determinants are probably found in the social environment. They may, however, be cumulative over the lifespan.Work published over a decade ago by Nicholas Christakis at Yale University on “dynamic social networks” indicates that common mental health problems (like depression) are not purely individual but can spread between neighbours.3 So what is the shared experience of people in deprived neighbourhoods? I think it could be a shared “precarity” of essentials like food or housing or heating. In the US, Senator Bernie Sanders has emphasised the challenge of 60% of Americans living “paycheck...

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Rising Need For Mental Healthcare Could Be Linked To Social Disadvantage

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