Edited by author 01-20-2003 04:54 PM
i never meant to imply that 1) this or any other mental illness only hits the poor, or 2) that this or any other mental illness describes the poor as a whole, or even in a signifigant part. if anything, i was trying to express the opposite- that the higher statistical incidence among the poor correlates to the trend of loss of wealth due to often, but not always, lower life functioning rather than to anything more intrinsic about poverty itself.

if anything i find the sentiment that the poor can't help this or that or aren't as happy as the middle class or rich is dehumanizing and wrong. but that's a soapbox for another time.

Edited by author 01-20-2003 09:26 AM
Poor doesn't mean dirty. I thought the article made that clear enough; I'll have to go back and look at it again.

This is a pathology that afflicts the rich and poor. Marilyn Barletta, a.k.a. the Petaluma Cat Lady, was a successful real estate agent who could afford to keep a second house to fill with catsh*t and miserable, overcrowded cats. The most famous trash house on record belonged to the Collyer brothers, well-to-do professionals (one lawyer, one architect) who lived in a three-story brownstone on NYC's Fifth Avenue.

(Of course, if you have money and you're only partly crazy, you can hire someone to tidy up after you. I could use some of that myself.)

The equation of poor and dirty is an old and much-argued one. There's an extent to which it's justified; the poor have a harder time keeping clean than those who are better off. It's unjustified insofar as the poor turn out to have the same impulse to keep clean as any other humans, when they have the means to do so. The other connection there is that the poor are likelier to be clinically depressed, a malady that does correlate with bad housekeeping.

A fairly recent study started from the observation that the kind of stresses that would render anyone prone to depression are a regular feature of the lives of the poor. They treated their test group as though their problem was severe depression, giving them intensive therapy and medical monitoring as well as antidepressant drugs. It was surprisingly successful.

This doesn't just affect the poor. As a just-left-university-and-haven't-a-clue job I worked for the Environmental Health Department of my local council back in the mid-90s. There I saw some scary things, especially when I helped the "Cems and Crems" team. The wierdest was visiting these pack-rat houses once the smell had got so bad that the neighbours or landlords complained and a body had been found.
Each time (this is normal apparently), we found there were no nearby relatives, so we had to enter and retrieve any cash or bank stuff (under witness supervision - hence my contribution). One, a little old lady who'd started to put her excreta in shopping bags and carefully piling it in the bath, even though the toilet was in fully working order, had £930,000 (about $1.4M) in cash salted away throughout the house. She slept on a half million each night, but lived in squalor.
In the end, a distant cousin in Australia was found and flew over to collect. Otherwise the Treasury would have found itself with a nice little earner...

If there's an environmental contribution to poor mental health -- through stress, poor diet, lead paint on the walls, pollution -- then there's another way poverty could correlate with mental illness.

there is a positive correlation between mental health and wealth- but not an important one. it merely reflects the fact that the mentally ill tend to fall though economic cracks downwards. as time goes by, they pool in poverty. it's not the the rich tend to be well adjusted, it's that the ill adjusted often lose their wealth... doubly so for the middle class.

typo. i fixed. thanks.

is there a correlation between wealth and mental health? I wouldn't think so but I just don't know. i would think the rich crazy people just have a support network and don't fall thru the cracks as easily.

Edited by author 01-19-2003 08:58 PM
i believe this is much more associated with mental illness than poverty, but mental illness is more associated with poverty than wealth. do mentally ill people choose how they live? probably not in any signifigant way.

stefan: i really like your point about poorly connected. we derive so much of our standards for what is good or right or even pleasurable from social context. when that's gone a lot of things we think are somehow intristic to us just go with it.

Edited by author 01-19-2003 06:45 AM
seems more to do with mental illness or deficiency than wealth. no one in this country has to live this way unless they "choose" too. it is sad that the social saftey net isn't catching these folks.

"Poorly connected" might be more accurate than "poor:" Folks without friends or concerned relatives who might intervene before things become desperate, and -- more importantly -- keep these unfortunate "connected" with a community that offers them more to do than collect kipple.

We have a family friend who moved to Florida to retire years ago; not a recluse by any means, but not a "joiner" either. He took to collecting road-side "trashure" with the intention of donating it to Goodwill and such. But he was always a bit lazy, and then his eyesight gave out. He ended up with a storage space and a spare house-trailer full of furniture and odds-and-ends, and no way to get rid of it.

He readily agreed to my parents' help, especially after they pointed out that the rent of the storage space far exceeded any possible tax break he'd get for donations. They actually managed to sell much of the stuff.

In a mixed blessing, being too blind to drive has put an end to his collecting habit, and gotten him connected with the other folks in the trailer park, who take him on errands.

Jason...it is not an affliction limited to the poor. I have three close connections with near to trash house situations. It is a scary thing.

why does poor mean dirty? I don't get the connection. Soap is cheap. Not having 30 tons of newspaper in your house is a free choice.

welcome to the world of the poor

"Things fall apart. You mean to, but then you don't. Or you do, but then you just lose track of it all. For awhile, perhaps, there was the desire. Later, a kind of fatigue. Time gets away. Something slips--a disconnect--and the heat goes. Tomorrow you will have to set everything right. But the idea gets lost underneath, in the piles. No one is watching, anyway. No one's coming over. No one's been notified."

Ok, ok, I give up, I'll put the sink dishes in the dishwasher!

Edited by author 01-18-2003 11:24 AM
"It was a solution once--a way to ensure a future.
And then, in time, it became a kind of surrender.
With garbage houses, we surmise that the resources
their occupants have and the demands of the universe
are badly mismatched."


I believe this is a case where the realWorld can't
compete with the virtualWorld; I mean, Cory can
easily and quickly back up everything he has that
is digitally encoded; try doing that with everything
that isn't.

Perhaps it is the flip-side (not of a vinyl record;
a toggle switch which flips a behavioural bit)
of the recently-blogged guy who is making a
structured, visual record of everything in his house.


tom
-=W=-