Poor Relations: Casino windfall reveals poverty’s toll on Cherokee kids’ behavior
By Bruce Bower
In a cruel double whammy, poor people endure material deprivation while experiencing more than their share of mental disorders. Some scientists theorize that this disproportion of mental illness stems from individuals with genetically based psychological ailments drifting into poverty and staying there. Other researchers suspect that the stress of financial hardship undermines emotional health.
An unusual new study boosts the latter view. During the 4 years after their families moved out of poverty thanks to a community-wide economic windfall, Cherokee children in rural North Carolina exhibited marked declines in behaviors such as delinquency, violence, disobedience, and truancy, according to epidemiologist E. Jane Costello of Duke University Medical School in Durham, N.C., and her coworkers. Mental-health clinicians typically diagnose kids with these problems as having either conduct disorder or oppositional defiant disorder, a penchant to defy authority.