Economic stress and mental health.

This paper correlates economic stress with minority status, resource allocations for mental health programs, and vulnerability to mental disability. Several hypotheses are advanced:1. A major and recurring psychological pattern of the American national character is prowhite, antiblack paranoia.2. Mental health fiscal allocations and programmatic determinations in ghetto, lower socioeconomic, minority-populated urban areas are predicated on political and racist considerations, the underlying motivation being to keep minorities at greater risk of mental disability.3. Economic privation and stress increase vulnerability to mental illness, especially in a minority population for whom health, mental health, educational, and social services are grossly inadequate.4. Poverty and economic stress combine with health systems that are unresponsive to the needs of blacks and other minorities, resulting in the perpetuation of disabilities and other conditions in blacks that are potentially preventable.5. Health and mental health resources should be increased rather than diminished during periods of economic stress, especially in the public sector.6. In order to provide each citizen with access to quality health and mental health care regardless of race and/or economic status, there must be enacted a national health insurance program based on tax-levy monies that will cover all aspects of health and mental health care.7. Racism and social status will continue to be powerful determinants of the quality of service that white professionals render to black patients and to poor white patients, unless our training institutions mount a massive campaign to train appropriately and to include significant numbers of minority candidates and trainees in the effort. To date this effort is virtually nonexistent.