By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, Too Much

WASHINGTON—Many Americans, says new polling from the Pew Charitable Trusts, don’t see inequality as a particular problem so long as society offers everyone an “opportunity” to get ahead.  These Americans just might feel a bit differently if they had a chance to chat with the analysts behind a stunning new survey of the latest global research on mental health. Mental Health, Resilience and Inequalities, prepared for the World Health Organization European Office by Dr. Lynne Friedli, in conjunction with the Mental Health Foundation, London, reports that income inequality may be driving people nuts.

Back in the 19th century, amid choking levels of infectious disease, scientists and eventually political leaders came to realize sewers and clean water could actually keep people healthy far better than any medical potion. Now here in the 21st century, amid the scourge of heart disease and other degenerative conditions, we may once again be poised for another great conceptual leap. We still, of course, need those sewers and that clean water. But we need something else, suggests this new report. We need respect and justice.

That’s not a message we normally expect to hear from mental health professionals.  We tend to think about mental health, after all, as a matter of individual pathology — and we tend to separate mental from physical health.

The distinguished mental health professionals behind this report don’t make that separation.  They link mental health to the diseases that ravage our physical health — and tie both mental and physical health to levels of social and economic injustice.

Our “individual and collective mental health and wellbeing,”  as Mental Health, Resilience and Inequalities pronounces, “depends on reducing the gap between rich and poor.” Read that sentence again, and think about its implications.

The British Mental Health Foundation backs this pronouncement up by walking us through a wide-ranging array of recent international medical research. “People with mental health problems,” research tells us, “have much higher rates of physical illness.”

Smoking, most of us understand, increases the risk of suffering cardiovascular disease.  But researchers have documented that “the absence of positive mental health” will put you at greater risk for cardiovascular disease than smoking.

Mind over matter? Stress over immune system might be a better formulation. Chronic stress beats down our body’s defenses, upsets our physiological balances, leaves us open to disease.

What stresses us? Living in poverty, for starters. Coping with deprivation and disadvantage,  day in and day out, wears us out. But stress doesn’t just come from eprivation, trying to make do without the material basics of life. Stress comes,

perhaps even more powerfully, from inequality, from the constant pressures that come with life in deeply divided societies, the foundation-backed report says.

“The adverse impact of stress is greater in societies where greater inequalities exist, and where some people feel worse off than others, it adds.” This stress impacts everyone, not just the poor.  Deep-seated inequality heightens status competition and status insecurity across all income groups and among both adults and children.”

The reverse also holds. The smaller a society’s economic divides, the less stress, the more health.

“Both high and low income populations,” points out Mental Health, resilience and Inequalities, “benefit in more equal societies.”

This Mental Health Foundation analysis goes on to detail how the dynamics of unequal societies play out, with a level of medical specificity readers outside the health professions may sometimes have trouble digesting. But if your eyes don’t glaze over when the discussion turns to “C-reactive proteins,” you’ll have no trouble navigating your way.

And even those of us who stumble over “neuroendocrine” pathways and “bio markers” will find plenty of value — and even inspiration — in these pages. We can become more healthy, the Mental Health Foundation reminds us, because we can become more equal.

“This is not about utopian visions,” the foundation sums up. “The comparison between Sweden and the United Kingdom shows that relatively small differences in levels of inequality can have very significant effects on health.”

Courtesy of Labor World, April 1, 2009