Of Inequality, Mental Illness and Bootstraps

A recent opinion piece in the New York Times discussed how inequality hollows out the soul. A key focus of the piece is that major and minor mental illnesses were three times as common in developed societies where there are large income disparities between rich and poor, such as in the United States. This piece resonated with me. One section in particular caught my attention:

"Two sociologists at the University of Toronto, Robert Andersen and Josh Curtis, found that although there is always some connection between people’s income and the social class to which they feel they belong, the match between the two is closer in societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor."

I found this an interesting claim. Because of my early life, I still think of myself as poor. If pressed I'll acknowledge that I am not, at this time, poor.  It is very difficult for me to think of myself as middle or upper middle class; if I am better off than I used to be, I tend to see it as both fortuitous and temporary. This is in some ways a positive situation for me, since it makes me empathetic to the poor. But my difficulty in acknowledging that my class position might have changed since my childhood and early youth also means that I sometimes miss out on the advantages of my change in class. In many ways, I am still breaking out of the box that first constrained me.

I don’t think that the opinion piece advocates the elimination of income disparity. Instead, I take it as a useful part of a broader discussion about how we view income disparity and the toll that our views take on the mental condition of both the poor and the rich.  As the article notes, the poor are much more likely to experience depression than the rich.  And the rich are, according to some research, more likely to experience conditions such as narcissism or feelings of grandeur. The interesting thing I find, however, is that narcissism, perhaps because of its greater association with the rich, is less stigmatized as a mental disorder than depression. 

Though we tend to laugh about narcissistic outliers, we are not really laughing that hard at most of them. Instead, our laughter is often the ambivalent, envious laughter of the socially striving. We wish that we were laughing with the narcissistic. There is some sense that narcissism is not a failing at all, unless it’s really, really out there.  Even recent psychological thinking on narcissism tends to move away from a categorical approach and towards a dimensional approach that centers on the severity of the dysfunctional personality. Recent changes in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual reflect this approach. What goes undiscussed much of the time is that there is, as I have written before, a distinctly gendered and classed aspect to discussions of narcissism. (See my previous post (In)Sanity, Thy Name is Woman.) There is also a racial aspect to narcissism. People of color, men or women, who exude, shall we say, too much confidence, are far more likely to be considered at the social if not psychological extremes of narcissism. Ask Richard Sherman.

It is almost as if we are supposed to be (somewhat) self-absorbed, vain, and self-aggrandizing as a result of being (or in order to become) wealthy. How else are we going to have the gumption to pull up our own bootstraps and keep them up?

There But for the Grace of God Go I, Again

Do the well off to do disdain the poor? According to research conducted by psychologist Susan Fiske, the answer is “yes.”  In the project subjects were placed in neuroimaging machines and shown photos of the poor and homeless.  The brains of subjects responded as though the photos depicted objects, not humans. This, apparently, is a sign of revulsion.

I find the claim here of poverty disdain to be very interesting chiefly because of the questions that the claim raises. What were the gender, race, class and educational levels of the subjects and of the observed persons? The answers to these questions would, I think, make a tremendous difference in assessing the subjects’ responses. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the research is the asserted connection between seeing people as objects and reviling them. I have no trouble believing that objectification is tied to revulsion. Whether discussing racism, misogyny, homophobia, or any other number of human ills, objectifying people is often a key element. But what is perhaps missing here is the consideration that an adverse reaction to the poor may not be triggered by disdain but rather by a well-founded fear of rejoining the ranks of the poor.

We like to posit that those who observe the poor and homeless should ideally experience a strong feeling of “there but for the grace of God go I.”   “There but for the grace of God go I” is a saying that is often meant to express humility at the recognition that the misfortune of others could be easily be one's own, but for divine or other fortuitous intervention.  It is also an expression of charity and amity towards the unfortunate. Fiske’s research tends to suggest that there is a good deal more enmity than amity towards the poor. This is not surprising. I find it odd that we would ever expect that the primal response of those observing images of the poor would be to acknowledge the role of providence or luck. We live, after all, in a society where many people persist in believing that both privilege and disadvantage are earned and/or deserved. Privilege and disadvantage are sometimes earned.  But just as often, maybe more often, they are not. Even where those viewing images of the poor do express humility and amity in professing a sense of “there but for the grace of God go I,” my sense is that these viewers are among the very comfortable and long-term well to do. For those viewers whose tenure in the middle class is newer and more tenuous, “there but for the grace of God go I” may express not humility but fear.  This latter group are often people who, like me, have already lived in poverty and do not want a return trip.

As a young child I lived with an aunt and her ten children. I am sure, to most observers, we hit all of the negative stereotypes--impoverished, black, poorly fed, unwashed and poorly dressed, barely housed, badly behaved (I speak for myself--I was a demon child with a cunningly angelic demeanor during that period of my life). My aunt did have a husband, though he was not the father of all of her children and she usually sent him out when the social worker came over to "inspect" how she was using her welfare benefits. I honestly do fear that I will live like that again, and that fear will never leave me. Some years back, when I was practicing law, I had to make a phone call to reach a client who had not appeared for a court hearing. As there was no available phone at the court, I had to use a public phone in a nearby welfare office. I found myself trembling as I waited for my turn using the phone and stood looking at all of the people around me and a flood of memories washed over me.

I experienced a very visceral and likely very measurable reaction to the poor people around me that day in the welfare office. But I did not tremble because I reviled the people or because I was afraid of the people; I was afraid of the possibility of living in that condition again. Some people may scoff at the notion of an apparently middle class person fearing that she will rejoin the ranks of the very poor. For some people, discussions of poverty in such a context may seem purely academic and so they are dismissed along with most other discourses on poverty that challenge the notion of the journey from poverty as a one way street. But for those of us who came from poverty and who continue to work for a living, however “professional” our jobs, past poverty does not make future poverty a moot possibility. This is anything but a moot point. The silence around the threat of re-impoverishment is part of what allows it to occur. By the time re-impoverishment happens, it is often too late for talk to prevent it. Like so many other social scourges that we refuse to talk about, re-impoverishment is a harm that, while imminently capable of repetition, evades review.