Mental health, the ads tell us, will be on our lips February 9 for Bell’s admirable “Let’s Talk” campaign to create a national conversation about mental health.
It’s also a subject that was on our lips in discussions about the tragedy of the Tucson shootings. And it’s a top-of-mind topic in Vancouver because of its huge impact on drug abuse and homelessness.
Thinking about this, I couldn’t shake off an unusual message from a December talk in Vancouver by British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, author of Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. He looked at mental-health rates in various countries, based on their levels of inequality (the ratio of the incomes of the top 20% compared with the bottom 20% of the population). He discovered a striking connection between countries with high inequality and countries with high rates of mental illness (as measured by the World Health Organization).
Among the “most equal” countries, Japan had an 8% level of mental illness. Among the “most unequal” industrialized countries, the U.S. – where the wealthiest 1% of Americans have a greater collective net worth than the bottom 90% – had a 27% rate of mental illness. Canada is somewhere in the middle.
It isn’t just mental illness that goes down with less inequality. In more equal societies like the Nordic countries and Japan, people are more likely to trust each other, live longer, be less obese, and their children are more likely to stay in school. They’re also less likely to take illegal drugs, go to jail or commit murder.
“More equal societies are almost always healthier, happier and more cohesive,” said Wilkinson.
He also looked at states within the U.S. to see if the same effects of inequality emerged. They did. Americans living in more equal states live about four years longer and their children do better in schools than those living in more unequal states.
The explanation is not that hard to understand. Humans are social animals who get stressed when we’re at the bottom of hierarchies. Extreme inequality makes life more stressful, even if people at the bottom have way more stuff now than they used to have: TVs, cellphones, nice sneakers.
It’s the greater distance from other people with so much more that causes chronic stress, and that leads to more rapid aging.
Wilkinson points out that violence grows out of people feeling looked down upon, disrespected or humiliated, citing five-fold differences in murder rates between different countries related to inequality.
In Detroit, the murder that led to the accidental police killing of a seven-year-old girl started when a 34-year-old man rode a moped to a corner store. He was outraged when a 17-year-old kid smirked at him. So he came back in a Chevy Blazer with two friends and a .357 Magnum and shot him through the chest.
“If you fail to avoid high inequality, you will need more prisons and more police,” asserted Wilkinson.
On the positive side, Wilkinson says greater equality benefits everyone – including those at the top. At some point everyone has to leave their gated community and head out into the streets. Even those at the top in unequal countries like the U.S., U.K. and Portugal live with worse outcomes than the elites in the more equal Nordic countries.
As for equality getting in the way of social mobility, the opposite is true. There is more social mobility in more equal societies. In a study of poor children’s chances of getting rich in eight leading countries, social mobility was least in the U.S.
“If you want to pursue the American dream,” said Wilkinson, “go to Norway.”
If we really want to reduce mental illness, we should reduce income inequality.
Next week I’ll look at how inequality is growing in Canada, and what can be done about it.