A growing body of research points to a simple yet powerful intervention for improving mental health: giving people money through direct cash transfer.
A new study published in Health Policy and Planning finds that national cash transfer programs (CTs) in Colombia, Mexico, and South Africa are associated with long-term reductions in depressive symptoms among young adults. These programs, designed to reduce poverty through direct payments, appear to have ripple effects beyond financial stability, lessening psychological distress, improving well-being, and easing the emotional burden of deprivation.
Led by researcher Anna Zimmerman and colleagues, the study analyzed nationally representative data from over 15,000 participants aged 18–30 across the three countries. The researchers found that each additional year a person spent enrolled in a CT program was associated with a 4% reduction in their likelihood of experiencing depressive symptoms.
“Earlier and longer exposure to CTs may reduce financial and psychological distress at the individual and household levels,” the authors write. “Reduced financial strain may also reduce the opportunity cost of time for mental health promotion activities such as physical exercise or socializing with friends.”
Poverty hinders communities’ ability to focus on education and employment, as it diverts their attention to meeting basic needs. This diversion leads to reduced opportunities in life. To address this issue, some countries have invested tax revenue into supporting the most disadvantaged members of their communities. Cash transfer programs (CT) can be lifesaving for these communities and help prevent the negative consequences faced by impoverished individuals, especially youth and children.
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Those who are without sorrow are the most sorrowful of all, because human sorrow is like a vast lake stretching from horizon to horizon to which we all add every day but from which few people drink. So don’t scowl at those who are sorrowful for the Earth and the human world, for they are drinking at the communal lake of the truth of all of our lives today, and those spiritual people who think they can flower without drinking from this lake have snakes in their eyes and nothing in their hearts. Who will be the most sorrowful human being who walks among us today across the whole Earth? Will it be the manifestly evil politician who hides his evil from no-one, or will it be the most neglected and forgotten orphan girl of some totalitarian state in which she is captured and then finally destroyed? Will it be a mother trekking across the African drought-stricken Savanah with her children and dying cattle, only to lose them all one by one? Perhaps she wouldn’t even have been told that the increasing droughts are attributed to the greed of the West, and that those who in future times flee from the countries that Western greed has destroyed will likely be walled off by the perpetrators of their misery unless those perpetrators are themselves starving and dying because of their wholesale reliance on a global economic system as all global relations come crashing down. Britain has become a miserable prison producing less then half the food it eats having poisoned all the rivers and streams in the country meaning we can’t even drink clean water without the infrastructure that destroys all our natural waterways. The country has been scarred by urban sprawl and farmland, these achres upon achres of monocrops on nutrient depleted soils sprayed with pesticides that killed over 70% of all British insects over a couple of decades. And property rights and restrictions against being in nature are so fundamental in the UK that you can get arrested if you so much as dig a bulb up from the ground in order to eat it. So if, or if you see clearly when, our social system comes crashing down and everyone retreats into their socially conditioned selfishness in order to survive, should our public systems fail we won’t even have clean water to drink. If we were all starving and killing each other and the other countries shut their doors to us and ignored our suffering, no-one could say it wasn’t justice. It would be justice for Palestine and Iraq, for Afghanistan and Yemen, and for all the countries we have destroyed and pillaged throughout our history, causing bottomless sorrow stretching deep and wide from horizon to horizon. But none of us will drink it strait. We first poison it with blame and lies and socially conditioned judgements, and then drink it to our intoxication, an activity we call patriotism. And everyone who drinks of that poison is that poison, and begets poison, the same poison that poisoned and destroyed the whole Earth. Made in England. A disease that flowered and then died killing us all within and without.
And Jesus himself said those who mourn will know peace. What could this mean? Well, surely we can all see that seeing and recognizing and then feeling the truth gives you pain but then after that, peace. So let’s all see the truth of our lives, our societies, our Earth and our children’s futures, and then let’s all mourn – for everything. And then perhaps we will know peace.
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Skeletons are beautiful, you know: they really are, as are their teeth, their ribs, their arms. They are exquisite, natural and peaceful things, whether a human, a cat or a wolf, or a stag with it’s immense horns. A living animal or a natural human being is also invariably a beautiful thing. It is only social history which destroys all beauty and turns natural creatures into tormented, distorted and broken natural things. If a skeleton can be beautiful why can’t we? I say again, social history, which is the society and it’s intellect without which we’d be free.
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I appreciate this content on MiA. Focusing on social justice approaches to prevent and reduce distress rather than only clinical ones is absent from so much research in mental health fields. It isn’t a huge leap to understand that living lives of less precarity can relieve mental health burdens more efficiently and just as well or more than investments in clinical care.
Instead of trying to sell the case for longterm therapy to get governments and insurers to pay its inefficient and huge cost, such endeavors should really be examined in juxtaposition in the efficient cost of just giving people a fraction of the funds that would otherwise go to clinicians to achieve modest outcomes on small scales. Making sure people have what they need to get by doesn’t have to be a great clinical intervention, it just has the benefit of being easily scaled, efficient, and likely not too far off out outcomes on measures used to to show evidence of effectiveness for drugs and psychotherapy.
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Obviously! Money doesn’t buy happiness, but goddamn can it make you happier than what you were and solves so so many problems.
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I agree, “what many people need is not more diagnoses, but more dignity, resources, and economic security.” But I’m not certain I agree with your conclusion that cash transfers are a good idea.
As an ethical banker’s daughter, I’d say the real solution is to turn over the unethical globalist bankers'” table” / bad banking system … again … and, hopefully, forever.
But in the story of my dreams, God’s ultimate goal is a free society, like with no money whatsoever. Albeit with the understanding by all, that God (our Creator) owns this planet, as well as all the planets in our ever expanding universe, and that there is both wisdom and folly within all religions … except, the DSM “bible” billers’ ‘religion’ / book of stigmatizations – there is no wisdom in a book of scientifically “invalid” stigmatizations – albeit I do admit the psychiatrists’ drugs can and do create the symptoms of their DSM disorders.
I was listening to this as I was reading your blog, and found a lot of wisdom within it, despite not actually being a believer in communism, since communism denies God’s existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqQCF5NBrDQ
But forgive my lack of full knowledge, since I’m still on my spiritual journey, working my way towards wisdom … yet I do now understand neither I, nor any one else, will ever be able to understand everything about all things, in our waking hours … nor do I even want to.
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I love this audiobook version of Teo Te Ching Someone Else – I don’t get why it refers to tractors and lorries in this ancient text but it is beautiful, a masterpiece, and full of truth – one of the most sublime spiritual works out there. I also absolutely adore the Ashtavakra Gita (there’s an excellent version posted by PhilPhlms on YouTube) and it sends you into rapture, or does me anyway, so I never get all the way through cuz it blows my mind too soon.
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Cash transfers sound like a good idea—as long as they aren’t used to pay therapists.
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