Does Poverty Cause Psychopathology

Does poverty cause psychopathology or does psychopathology cause poverty? That is the question underlying the debate between social causation and social selection as potential theories to explain the relationship between socio-economic status (SES) factors and psychopathology. Social causation theory suggests that stress resulting from adversity, including living in poverty, increases risk for psychopathology; meanwhile, social selection theory contends that genetic predisposition to psychopathology may inadvertently result in poverty. (Costello, Compton, Keeler, & Angold, 2003; Dohrenwend et al., 1992) In “Relationships between poverty and psychopathology: A natural experiment”, Costello and colleagues (2003) explore these two theories regarding …show more content…
Not only does parental supervision as a mediator provide stronger evidence for social causation for behavioral disorders, it is also in line with existing evidence regarding the role of parenting on child psychopathology. For instance, a literature review on the role of parenting in psychopathology performed by Collins and colleagues (2000) also posits the harmful effects of poverty on child psychopathology are mediated by the effects of poverty on parenting abilities. In addition to parental supervision, other mechanisms by which poverty may adversely affect parenting, and ultimately increase a child’s risk for behavioral disorders, include parental involvement in school, “parental punitiveness (pg. 228)”, and the effects of poverty on the strength of parental influence on children. (Collins, Maccoby, Steinberg, Hetherington, & Bornstein, …show more content…
While diathesis-stress models suggest that psychopathology is a result of an interaction between stress and unique predisposing factors, threshold models, a sub-type of diathesis-stress models, build upon this theory and argue that the intensity of a stressor can cause an individual to cross a threshold that results in psychopathology(Grant & Luxton, 2005). Specific to this study population, there is the possibility that in comparison to non-Native Americans, Native American children have a lower threshold for the development of emotional disorders due to trans-generational trauma, which is best defined as when “stressors proliferate across generations (Slide 8)”. (Townsend, 2016) This is supported by multiple study findings that Native Americans may be at increased risk for the development of emotional disorders including anxiety and depression resulting from generations of institutionalized discrimination, forced assimilation, and attempts at the “…elimination of a culturally distinct Native population (pg. 43)”. (Sarche & Whitesell, 2012) While Costello and colleagues did report that the associations between poverty