Primary Research Project: Are poverty and (some) mental illnesses symptoms of the same disease? (Capitalism) CRQ: Is hard work really all a person “needs” to succeed? With all that’s going on in the world, why this? Why is generational poverty the issue we should spend time and resources on when we have a global pandemic going on? To simply put it, because the people previously and currently living in poverty are going to be the ones that continue to feel the effects of the pandemic (or it’s possible resulting recession) long after the initial threats are treated. With COVID wreaking havoc on every industry we have, there’s no telling when the job force will stabilize and this means families are forced to rely on public assistance programs to get by, through no fault of their own. No amount of planning ahead or hard work could have prepared anyone for the falling out we as a planet experienced in 2020. Knowing this, we have to start looking at what we can do, starting with public assistance programs and adjusting their guidelines to reflect current economic needs.
When considering a person’s possibilities, it’s important to take their current and past living situations into account too. Our society has been built into a capitalistic machine with a terrible side effect: poverty, and the way it affects mental and financial health. At its base level, it causes basic human needs to go unmet, leaving people with limited ability to break past those barriers- no matter how much hard work they put into doing so. If we truly pay attention to the quality of life some people have, this is where we see that hard work is in fact not all a person “needs” to succeed, and my survey’s results confirm this.
I ultimately decided to use a custom generated survey (through Google, you can take the survey yourself here) instead of observation or interview. I had reached out to several people for interviews but no one had the availability in their schedule within our time frame. Observation would have been preferable as a long term study in schools, but again time was not on our side in addition to COVID. I highly encourage our local and state officials to look into furthering this research as well. With this survey however, it allowed me to get a much wider range of information to give a greater chance of either disproving my theory or supporting it. I wanted to avoid the possibility of skewing results with “one-of” situations and it allowed for users to answer as they had the time. To determine the questions I asked, I reviewed my previous paper and found neutral ways to ask one way or the other. Several multiple choice options, all with an additional “other” option so they could enter their own if I did not provide the right one for them. Providing the “other” option was both helpful and not in that some people used it to give explanation even if they could have selected one of the options given. Still though, the explanations given were helpful in seeing just how messy lives can get when you and your family live in survival mode.
As of writing this, 69 people have answered the survey giving the following results: 49.3% lived with siblings and both parents as a child, just under that currently live with a roommate or partner now. 44.9% felt their needs had somewhat been met as a child and only 68.1% feel capable of meeting their own needs as an adult with 78.3% of people believing they have the resources they need to actually do so. 52.2% grew up aware of their family’s financial insecurity and roughly that number feel their financial situation is still considered insecure. As children, only 71% of people were encouraged to pursue hobbies and interests and 69% consider themselves able to still pursue them even as adults. 53.6% of their parents were able to achieve a degree of some kind while the next generation’s college graduation rate dropped to 40.5% (resulting in a decrease of 13.1%), only 8 of which did not rely on public assistance programs to pay for their education. When asked what their parents encouraged them to accomplish in life from a list of five options only 9 people selected all of them, and most of the other results included an “other” option with family pressure to get a job young or marry rich.
68.1% had regularly established medical care as a child but that number dropped to 50.7% as adults due to losing state or family coverage once coming of age. 78.3% felt they had food security as a child and fortunately that number did go up to 82.6% in adulthood. Moving patterns established in childhood seemed to carry over into adulthood except for the amount of people staying in one place - only two adults have had such luck, with an increase in moving more than in childhood. Employment habits seem to have the same trend in that most parents changed careers or companies several times and in adulthood we see even more of this in the next generation. COVID wreaking havoc has not impacted nutritional needs but has absolutely impacted employment and livelihood. 53.5% consider their debt to income ratio unbalanced and unable to maintain long term. 96.8% of the people that received a stimulus check immediately spent most (if not all) on bills and needed life maintenance such as car/house repairs or medical bills. 71% of people said a UBI would be an above average benefit to their home and every person answered that they’d use it to take care of debts, go back to school, take care of family or pursue passions in their free time.
Based on the data we have access to, decision making as well as money management and life patterns clearly carry over to the next generation. If a family is financially insecure while a child is growing up, those survival mode techniques will carry into adulthood and perpetuate the cycle. When resources are limited, children are not encouraged to explore, learn and grow. They are required to take on some of the burden of surviving. Into adulthood, they enter that same mindset and instead of thriving, flounder. Food insecurity is not an issue, thankfully, but every other statistic shows public assistance programs could do a great deal to help set future generations up for success and give current generations a chance to level out as well.
This data clearly reinforces the theory that poverty and some mental illnesses (and the trauma associated with them) are generational, and not easily overcome. In America, we’re told this narrative that anything is possible and we can be whoever we want to be, if we simply work hard enough towards those goals. Anyone living today who was not fortunate enough to be born into a family already equipped with the needed resources for basic human functions, can disagree. With the narrative, “hard work is all you need to succeed in life”, it gives people an innate sense of failure while people who were born into well off families disregard their efforts despite putting in vastly lower amounts of time, work and energy into the same sort of projects simply because their basic human needs are already regularly met. These polar opposite view points create a divide of hard workers vs lazy mooches, instead of our society vs a failing capitalistic society.
With this confirmation, I hope to show our state officials and fellow community members that public assistance programs are absolutely worth funding at a higher level than we do, and the guidelines need to be adjusted to reflect current standards and pricing of living. We as a society are only as strong as our weakest link and because of our capitalistic system, there are far too many of them. If we pool our resources into the programs based around medical care, housing, child care and so on, we can better set future generations up for success by making sure each citizen’s needs are met. Only then, can we truly thrive.
Sources:
Elliott, I. (June 2016) Poverty and Mental Health: A review to inform the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Anti-Poverty Strategy. London: Mental Health Foundation.