Renters have higher rates of anxiety than home owners, it’s been claimed by a think tank.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation says that with 7.3 million English adults already having received antidepressants, there are clear connections between financial insecurity and poor mental health.
It claims reforms to rental and employment laws could help address the mental health problems which cost the health service around £15bn a year, and the wider economy an estimated £100 billion-plus.
Concentrating on data from just before the pandemic and current cost of living crisis, the foundation looked at various indicators of mental health.
It found that renters are at least twice as likely as homeowners to report losing sleep, feeling under strain or depressed, and also at far greater risk of lacking both energy and calm in their lives.
People with less than £1,000 in the bank were around twice as likely to admit to taking less care with work or other tasks or to report that their social life was suffering than those with £5,000 or more.
People employed in insecure ways such as zero-hours contracts have poorer mental health than secure workers.
The report also underlined the close connection between antidepressants prescriptions and local economic exposure: all 10 of the English communities with the highest prescription rates are in the north including Blackpool and Middlesborough which consistently rank among the most deprived areas in England.
Two major 21st Century trends have exacerbated our insecurity problem, claims the foundation.
First, a “swing” of around 10 percentage points of the whole working-age population out of homebuying and into a private rentals, “in a market where rents are uncapped and insecurity of tenure is rife.”
Second, a growth since the dawn of the financial crisis … in the proportion of households classed as having no savings at all.
Report author Tom Clark says: “This report picks up on a rising sense of insecurity in Britain today. It interrogates the potential connection between the shaky foundations of material life for many of our citizens and burgeoning signs that a growing anxiety problem is gripping the country.
“Too many people are caught up in a vicious cycle in which mental distress impedes confidence, leading to problems at work, which can in turn lead to issues with debt, housing and even relationships, leading to still more worry.
“While more analytical work is needed, what’s already clear is that the UK has big, and on many measures, growing problems with both material insecurity and mental distress, and that the two very much seem to be linked.
“The Government needs to wake up to the reality of the twin problems of insecurity and anxiety, which are doing great harm to both national economic welfare and individual well-being.”
