Psychosis and poverty: Coping with poverty and severe mental illness in everyday life

Abstract

In psychiatry, it is assumed that the social conditions of everyday life do not in themselves affect the severity of an individual’s mental ill health. Rather, the illness is the cause of problems that the individual meets in daily life. However, recent studies indicate that social factors can explain behavior that has ordinarily been regarded as symptoms of mental illness. The aim of the present study is to investigate how people with a psychosis diagnosis manage their economic difficulties. Nineteen persons with a psychosis diagnosis were interviewed on several occasions in the course of a follow-up study. The interviews were analyzed according to Grounded Theory. The present study shows that the persons had developed different rational ways of coping with economic strain: reducing their expenses, increasing their incomes or borrowing money and acquiring debts. Living under poverty negatively affects their possibility to acquire and maintain a social network and their sense of the self. The study contributes to our knowledge of the nature of psychosis and its relationship to the social context.