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Introduction
Introduction
The purpose of this website is to show a relationship between someone's income and their risk for developing depression. Depression can affect anyone, but people with low income are especially at risk. If you or someone you know may experience this risk, please read our website. Thank you for visiting.
How is depression connected to income?
How is depression connected to income?
Depression is a condition that anyone can experience. Our website serves to highlight how income level affects people and causes depression. Even though we live in current times, we still see people affected by things unfairly. This is in matters of health, and on income levels.
Women and the impoverished are some of the people who suffer from depression that's at least partially caused by income. This means compared to another group of people, like men with moderate incomes, this group that experiences unfair income is more likely to experience depression.
Lower income people experience the lack of eating healthy, not feeling motivated to finish a professional career, or feeling powerless because they don't have resources to make more money. These all can lead to depression. When these basic needs are not met, people with lower income suffer because they want to change their life but can't. More unfairness means worse physical health (Patel et al., 2018). This causes depression.
Making sure everyone is healthy is very important in society. Although sometimes salary can't be controlled by regulations, there are ways to make it happen. This can include education, or workers unions. Organized labor makes better conditions for employees. This makes finding solutions that are beneficial to improve income fairness that much more important (See What's Next? to see what's being done so far).
Social outcomes affect people with low income too. They become socially isolated from feeling depressed about their finances. They can't overspend to do certain social activities that are normal for others. For example, eating out at a restaurant, going shopping at the mall, or indulging themselves in fine goods.
Pictured below is a visual representation of demographics related to depressive orders. These are based on whether the survey participant experienced symptoms of depression or not in Texas in 2018. Data sourced from the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Pictured is a graph showing percentage of depression in adults 20 and older based on federal poverty level
(Texas Department of State Health Services (2021).
How do we know this is happening?
How do we know this is happening?
Mental health is a subject that affects everyone, whether we know it or not. Just like some days you may feel sick and have the sniffles, your mental health gets sick too. Some days you may not feel yourself, or you may just generally feel bad mentally. That’s perfectly normal! Whenever these feelings happen consistently, that’s something called depression. Now that you know mental health is widespread, you may be thinking how do we track it? How do we know who it affects the most? One of the ways this is accomplished is through the BRFSS, or the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (Oswald & Wu, 2011).
So, what is the BRFSS? The BRFSS is a survey health departments use to find data regarding people who are affected by mental health. In our case, depression. The BRFSS is connected to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but it’s distributed at a more local level. Typically, health departments will call people who are known to have depression or are at risk for depression. When the health department calls, they’ll ask questions like where you live, what gender you are, what you do for a living, and other general “Who am I talking to” questions (CDC - BRFSS - Survey Data & Documentation, 2020). From there, typically the surveyor will start asking health questions. This includes how your physical health has been recently, and other general questions about medical history. Finally, to gauge any kind of behavioral risks, the surveyor will ask general mental health questions. These include how your emotions have been recently, and they’ll also ask if you’ve engaged in any dangerous behaviors such as drug use. For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control, a question on the 2019 Texas BRFSS survey was "Have you ever been told you have a form of depression?", with 17.2% of participants answering yes (2020).
You may be wondering, why does this matter? How often does this happen? To put it simply, this information matters because it’s what tells professionals who’s at risk. Several groups may be at greater risk for experiencing issues with depression, such as low-income groups When professionals know who needs the most help, they get it! This is important information, because according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, out of roughly 2500 low-income individuals surveyed, 23.6% stated they had experienced symptoms of depression, making low-income individuals one of the most affected populations by the illness (2021). This is significantly higher than the percentage of general population in Texas who experienced symptoms of depression, which was 16.5% according to the Texas DSHS (2021). These surveys usually happen yearly, and the questions change every year to better fit the survey participants. While this survey may only be yearly, surveillance about depression and mental health is constant. Professionals are always looking out for everyone and trying to do what’s best to improve health.
Pictured below is a table representing further demographic information provided by a BRFSS style questionnaire conducted by the Texas DSHS. Decimals represent the fraction of survey participants that answered "yes" to experiencing symptoms of depression per their demographic group.
Pictured is the logo for the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System by the CDC
Linked is a TED talk discussing the connections and issues connecting poverty (extremely low income) to mental health issues
(Texas Department of State Health Services (2021).
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