I’m going to let you into an open secret — social status determines the likelihood of having a mental illness, accessing mental healthcare, your experience of it and how well you recover (or not). Poverty makes you mentally ill and so does being from a minoritised group — there, the cat’s out of the bag.
I’m Clinical Director of the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (NCCMH) at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Clinical Director for Forensic Services at the Maudsley and a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.
In the 30 years I’ve worked as a psychiatrist, it has become inescapable that inequality and deprivation make people ill, prolongs their illness and causes them to relapse, again and again. And like Marmot says, we have been treating people only to return them to the very conditions that made them ill in the first place.
