People with mental illness have always been marginalised and economically disadvantaged. Warner (1987) has shown that this is particularly true in times of high unemployment. Poor inner-city areas have excessive rates of severe mental illness, usually without the health, housing and social service provisions necessary to deal with them (Faris & Dunham, 1959). The majority of those who suffer major mental illness live in impoverished circumstances somewhere along the continuum of poverty. Homelessness, however defined, is the extreme and most marginalised end of this continuum, and it is here that we find disproportionate numbers of the mentally ill.
How harmful are cuts in public employment and wage in times of high unemployment?
