A new study published in the International Journal of Public Health examines the relationship between fuel poverty and mental health, revealing how large-scale economic and political failures manifest as individual psychological distress. Led by S. Khavandi of the University of Manchester, the research finds that fuel poverty—defined as the inability to afford adequate energy to heat and power a home—is consistently linked to poor mental health outcomes.
The authors identify four primary pathways through which this form of deprivation affects mental well-being: economic strain, environmental hardship, social isolation, and behavioral limitations.
“Forty-six of the 47 included studies found a detrimental association between fuel poverty and mental health, with one quantitative study reporting no effect,” the authors write. “Our review highlighted several groups who are more vulnerable to fuel poverty and to the detrimental effects it can have on mental health, including: the elderly, those with long-term health conditions, families with children, and those with disabilities.”
The study underscores how the mental health consequences of fuel poverty disproportionately affect marginalized groups, including the elderly, people with disabilities, those with long-term health conditions, and families with children. Despite the well-documented risks for these groups, few studies have specifically analyzed how fuel poverty affects them. The researchers argue that this lack of focus reflects a larger tendency to individualize mental health struggles rather than interrogate the social conditions that contribute to them.
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You have no appreciation of the serious circumstances you are facing in America. Of course poverty causes mental distress, but Trump and Musk are set to create even more mental and emotional and physical distress by every means including making the poor much poorer, and sloughing off more of the middle class into the poverty bracket, which they should be OK with, having tolerated tent cities full of homeless people for decades with numbers only ever rising. “If you tolerate this you’re children will be next” says the Manics, but we should rephrase it: BECAUSE you tolerated this, now it’s your turn, and that of your kids. On what grounds can you launch an effective response to this crisis in America? On political grounds, where the political system delivered a second Trump term and allowed the richest man on Earth to use his money to secure one of the most powerful jobs in the US government which he is using to exercise an almost monarchical tyranny over the poor, to squeeze yet more out of them? Are you going to mount your assaults on rational grounds when most Americans live on cloud cookoo land and thing politics is about what you want rather then on an understanding of what actually is, both domestically and globally? The clear truth of your circumstances is that America and all Americans are lost, because American society and it’s conditioning of our brains, which produces American social consciousness, has become an inescapable prison of the heart and mind that has destroyed and disempowered you physically and psychologically and has been dominated and instrumentalized now by violent and irrational forces set to isolate and then pillage you while wreaking as much global destruction and instability as possible. The only hope you have left is in your passports, but this is not a great hope either because the whole world is tearing itself apart out of it’s own confusion, desperation, and it’s unconquerable escapist yearnings that expresses itself as the greed that has destroyed the Earth and all our children’s futures. America is the mighty Mecca of a destructive and now dying civilization based on greed that wants to take the Earth down with itself and is succeeding. The whole of Western civilization was always a movement of domination, authority and greed, but the era of these things is over. You have to find secure grounds elsewhere, and the only secure ground is seeing all things as they are, no matter how horrifying.
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I’m experiencing EXACTLY what you’ve described.
It’s overwhelmingly difficult for me currently because of the “escapism” manner(s) you’re referring to,….. were engrained into me, (psychologically, psyche, behavior(s), culturally, mentally, etc etc), at a very early age, and because of the occurrence of the behaviors learned over a lifetime, I now have a permanent handicap/disability, (TBI), which FURTHER lessens my ability/abilities to even have the function to support myself and even just, “exist”.
At the VERY lowest point/time, (with EXTREMELY minuscule amount(s) of ANY “resources”), of my entire lifetime of 53 years.
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I think humanity too is at it’s lowest point so definitely good not to take it personally. Those who imagine their lives are rosey today are possibly the most sick among us if you ask me.
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