Poverty under the light of Neurosciences

What is it about?

As the economic crisis continues all over the world and the distance between financial inequalities, the ‘rich-poor gap’, that varies considerably across countries, increases constantly, the dimensions of the problem of situational poverty are also augmented in the increasingly globalizing society of our Era.Although the alleviation of the financial crisis remains a core issue in the social and humanitarian policy of all countries, the poverty is consistently ascending, affecting the psychosocial homeostasis of millions of people, exerting serious long-term effects on personal and social well-being, given that it is a main contributor to many serious social and legal problems.

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Why is it important?

There are multiple potential links between low economic incomes, deprivation and health status. Poverty and unemployment may be considered as potential risk factors for mental disorders according to WHO, since higher incidence of mental morbidity, associated with mortality and physical or intellectual disability has been reporter in low income communities than in prosperous ones.It has been reported that the nonpsychotic psychiatric morbidity, that is mostly constituted by the feeling of anxiety, frustration, depression, social insecurity and psychosomatic phenomena are mainly prevalent among people who live under the condition of poverty and material deprivation and face serious humanitarian problems and emotional distress. In addition, the persistent generational poverty in association with the psychological or mental distress affects the capacity of the person to re-integrate into society by building supportive social relationships or by participating in productive activities, a phenomenon that is mostly common in communities of low-income countries, where mental illness and poverty interact in a vicious circle. From the psychological point of view, long lasting poverty induces, as a rule, the sense of insecurity, helplessness and humiliation, increasing therefor the despair and the further social isolation of the individual, given that each additional year in poverty increases the deprivation and makes the possibility of recovery obscure and scarcely achievable. It is important that poverty may have a negative impact on brain development, affecting probably the organization and the plasticity of neuronal networks in areas of the brain associated with working memory, attention processes, inhibitory control, emotion and behavior, such as hippocampus, amygdala, temporal, frontal cortex and cerebellum.Clinical studies revealed that children who were grown under conditions of nutritional deprivation and psychological distress showed smaller hippocampus and amygdala in neuroimaging, in comparison with children who lived under sufficient nutritional and psychological conditions.

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