Title: Socioeconomic status and mental health - Wikipedia
Headings: Socioeconomic status and mental health
Socioeconomic status and mental health
Contents
Social causation
Research
Faris and Dunham (1939)
Hollingshead and Redlich (1958)
Midtown Manhattan Study (1962)
Downward drift
Research
Weich and Lewis (1998)
Isohanni et al. (2001)
Wiersma, Giel, De Jong and Slooff (1983)
Debate
Implications for schizophrenia
See also
References

Content: The authors identified anyone who was hospitalized or in treatment for mental illness by looking at files from clinics, hospitals, and the like. They were able to design a valid and reliable construct to relate these findings to social class using education and occupation as measures for five social class groups. Their results showed high disproportions of schizophrenia among the lowest social group. They also found that the lower people were on the scale of social class, the likelier they were to be admitted to a hospital for psychosis. Midtown Manhattan Study (1962)
The study by Srole, Langer, Micheal, Opler, and Rennie, known as the Midtown Manhattan Study, has become a quintessential study in mental health. The main focus of the research was to "uncover [the] unknown portion of mental illness which is submerged in the community and thus hidden from sociological and psychiatric investigators alike". The researchers managed to probe deep into the community to include subjects usually left out of such studies. The experimenters used both parental and personal SES to investigate the correlation between mental illness and social class. When basing their results on parental SES, approximately 33 percent of Midtown inhabitants in the lowest SES showed some signs of impairments in mental functioning while only 18 percent of the inhabitants in the highest SES showed these signs. When assessing the relationship based on personal SES, 47 percent of inhabitants in the lowest SES showed signs of weakening mental functions while only 13 percent of the highest SES demonstrated these symptoms.