- Renters, insecure workers and families with minimal savings
caught up in what looks like a vicious cycle, where poor
financial health and mental health feed off each other
- Distress markers, such as lost sleep and feelings of
worthlessness, are more than twice as common among renters and
minimal savers, as among homeowners or those with substantial
nest eggs
Amid rocketing rates of diagnosis for anxiety, and with 7.3
million English adults already having received antidepressants by
2017-18, a new report from the Joseph Rowntree
Foundation launching today (Thursday 10 November)
establishes many connections between financial insecurity and
poor mental health.
It is calling for more to be done to protect all those millions
of Britons, and not just those on the very lowest incomes, who
are feeling exposed, at a time of rocketing prices and interest
rates.
Reforms to rental and employment laws which JRF has long called
for could, on the strength of the new report’s findings, bolster
not only financial security but might also begin to address the
mental health problems which cost the health service around £15bn
a year, and the wider economy an estimated £100bn plus.
Concentrating on data from just before the pandemic and current
cost of living crisis, the JRF looked at 12 important indicators
of mental health and well-being from a large nationwide survey:
- Renters are at least twice as likely as homeowners to report
losing sleep, feeling under strain or depressed, and also at far
greater risk of lacking both energy and calm in their lives.
- People with less than £1,000 in the bank were around twice as
likely to admit to taking less care with work or other tasks or
to report that their social life was suffering than those with
£5,000 or more.
- People employed in insecure ways such as zero-hours contracts
have poorer mental health than secure workers.
The report also underlined the close connection between
antidepressants prescriptions and local economic exposure:
- All 10 of the English communities with the highest
prescription rates are in the north including Blackpool and
Middlesborough which consistently rank among the most deprived
areas in England.
- Overall, the number of antidepressant prescriptions is about
twice as high in the most-deprived 10th parts of England as in
the least-deprived 10th, and this differential is even more
marked in prescriptions of drugs used to treat more severe
conditions, such as psychosis.
Taken together, the OECD numbers on people who are either on a
very low income (and so automatically exposed to any economic
shock) with the OECD’s tally of those whose low savings put them
at risk of falling into poverty, the JRF report suggests
that Britain has more economic insecurity than Italy, France or
Germany, although less than the USA.
Factoring in the extremely low rate of British unemployment
benefits further darkens the picture.
Two major 21st Century trends have exacerbated our
insecurity problem. First, a “swing” of around 10 percentage
points of the whole working-age population out of homebuying and
into a private rentals, in a market where rents are uncapped and
insecurity of tenure is rife. Second, a growth since the dawn of
the financial crisis, of between four and eight percentage points
depending on the data-set used, in the proportion of households
classed as having no savings at all.
In the short term, these findings make clear the Government
should use the fiscal statement next week to bring true stability
to lives which are currently being lived on shifting sands.
Without clear, consistent action this will be an anxious winter
followed by extremely lean years for many on low or even middle
incomes.
Tom Clark, JRF Fellow and Journalist, who
authored the report, said:
“This report picks up on a rising sense of insecurity in Britain
today. It interrogates the potential connection between the shaky
foundations of material life for many of our citizens and
burgeoning signs that a growing anxiety problem is gripping the
country.
“Too many people are caught up in a vicious cycle in which mental
distress impedes confidence, leading to problems at work, which
can in turn lead to issues with debt, housing and even
relationships, leading to still more worry.
“While more analytical work is needed, what’s already clear is
that the UK has big, and on many measures, growing problems with
both material insecurity and mental distress, and that the two
very much seem to be linked.
“The Government needs to wake up to the reality of the twin
problems of insecurity and anxiety, which are doing great harm to
both national economic well-fare and individual well-being
Ends
The full report, “Anxiety Nation?: Economic insecurity and mental
distress in 2020s Britain” by Tom Clark and Andrew Wenham is
attached Anxiety nation - Economic
insecurity and mental distress in 2020s Britain.pdf
