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Article: MENTAL ILLNESS AND POVERTY: DOES ONE CAUSE THE OTHER?
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- March 8, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2005 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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It has been a chicken-and-egg question for decades: Does the
misery of poverty breed mental illness, or does the burden of mental
illness cast people down into poverty? The two clearly tend to go
together, but which causes which?
This week, a Massachusetts researcher published possibly the
broadest study yet on the question, examining tens of thousands of
hospital records statewide to see whether patients who were
hospitalized for mental illness then "drifted down" to less affluent
ZIP codes.
The study, which followed patients from 1994 through 2000, turned
up surprisingly little such downward drift, said the researcher,
Christopher G. Hudson, a professor at Salem State College and expert
in ...