Is the recent economic downturn or ‘credit crunch’ as its generally referred to, not only affecting our bank balance, but also our health? New evidence suggests that this is true.
An expert in European public health, Professor Martin McKee, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says much of the research on the issue was done in the former Soviet Union where there was a “dramatic deterioration in financial security”.
“We have shown that regions in the Soviet Union which had the most rapid rate of economic change, for example, loss of jobs, had the highest increase in death rates,” he says. “And there are lots of other historical parallels, for example as shown in Charles Dickens’ novel, Hard Times,” he says.
In wealthy countries however, there is not a particularly strong relationship between economic success and a long life. For example, the fact the US is around twice as rich as say Spain or Greece is not reflected in life expectancy. It appears that our social environment may prove more important.
Professor Richard Wilkinson a social epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham says however, that instability in the job market can have an impact on our health.
“Unemployment is always quite damaging to the unemployed themselves but also to those left in jobs who feel increasingly insecure. When people started looking at unemployment and health they looked at factory closures where everyone was laid off together but they found that health actually worsened before when there was a threat of closure.”
He says it ultimately comes down to stress: “Stress effects the cardiovascular system and the immune system and in the long term it leads to a sort of ‘rapid ageing’ making you vulnerable to all sorts of different things,” he explains.
In fact a recently published study shows psychological distress such as anxiety, insomnia, depression, apathy and fatigue can more than double the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in men.
Professor Danny Dorling, an expert in human geography at the University of Sheffield carried out a study in the 1990s to ask what benefits would there be if British society was more “equal”. He found some 2500 deaths per year in the under 65s would be prevented in a scenario where there was full employment.
“People are twice as likely to die when they are not employed,” he says. “It’s not because people are poorer, it’s the risk of being made redundant which effects a person’s chances of dying.”
“The really bad thing about a recession is people internalise their feelings of fear and the effects you can measure are really just the tip of the iceberg. Also the effects are cumulative - it’s rather like smoking, the collected insults prematurely age you. Rates of depression are likely to rise and we’re already taking a record amount of antidepressants,” he says.
Fertility may be another casualty in lean times as people marry later in life and hold back from having children, he adds.
Professor Alan Maryon Davis, president of the Faculty of Public Health said whether or not the credit crunch will make people “unhealthy” is a difficult one to answer.
“I expect you will see an effect on mental well-being because people will feel very pressured. But people do not always behave as you would expect,” he adds.
“Look at post-war Britain - everyone was living a pretty deprived existence but mental health and well-being was fairly good.”
Professor McKee agrees the picture is not black and white.
“The key issue is change - there’s also evidence that rapid increases in the economy are bad for people so it can work both ways.”
