Must-Read: : The Minimum Wage and the Social Determinants of Mental Health: “Does increasing incomes improve health?…
…In 1999, the UK government implemented minimum wage legislation, increasing hourly wages to at least £3.60. This policy experiment created intervention and control groups…. We compared the health effects of higher wages on recipients of the minimum wage with otherwise similar persons who were likely unaffected because (1) their wages were between 100 and 110% of the eligibility threshold or (2) their firms did not increase wages to meet the threshold…. The intervention group, whose wages rose above the minimum wage, experienced lower probability of mental ill health compared with both control group 1 and control group 2. This improvement represents 0.37 of a standard deviation, comparable with the effect of antidepressants (0.39 of a standard deviation) on depressive symptoms…..
In the The New Republic, I argue that this study is important because it shows us a way to attack the social determinants of mental health…. The finding that you can reduce mental health problems by increasing the minimum wage is important because raising the wage is easier than redesigning the mental health treatment system…. In the wake of all the mass shootings, many US politicians have called for ‘mental health reform’. I’m all for improving mental health care, but small tweaks to how that system is administered will not change population mental health. The British data suggest, however, that we might be able to reduce the rate of mental illness in a highly-stressed subpopulation by providing them with a living wage.