Poverty psychology

On Tuesday, the IDS ran a story called “Edge of Poverty,” written by Matthew Glowicki. The story follows Cassie Winders, an Elletsville single mother living on food stamps. 

The article should be required reading for all IU
students.

According to the article, “17.5 percent of residents in Monroe county are ‘food insecure,’ meaning they lack consistent access to sufficient amounts of healthy food.”
 
The issue of poverty in our city and on a national level is not a political issue, but an issue of human rights.

In the article, when Winders and her children ran out of food stamp funds and could not buy toilet paper, they used coffee filters instead.

It’s easy for us to ignore what is hard to understand. As students, we have warm beds and a bounty of meal points. We have basic supplies. We have toilet paper.

A blog post titled “This is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense” recently went viral, stimulating a discussion on poverty. Author Linda Tirado explains the psychologically crippling aspects of poverty, a subject often overlooked.

Like Glowicki’s article also emphasized, being poor is a cycle that is difficult to break.

Poverty isn’t something you just bounce back from. The poor cannot simply “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” if they have no bootstraps to hold onto.
 
Many people will read this article as well as Tirado’s blog post, feel sad for a minute, and then toss it aside.

Poverty is a complicated issue with more elements than I dare take on in a single column. But the first step to fighting poverty is understanding the psyche of the poor.
 
We pass the homeless men and women on Kirkwood and avert our gazes.

It is easier to assume the likes of drug addiction, or that the poor and homeless brought their situation upon themselves. Almost always, we assume poverty is that person’s own fault.

Personal decisions do come into play, but we need to stop generalizing the poor and understand that they come from many different backgrounds and
circumstances.

Letting what we might call “freeloaders” speak for the entire group is irresponsible and unfair.

Researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick have found that the mental load of poverty, having to think about financial troubles on a daily basis, is equivalent to losing an entire night’s sleep.

Basically, the mental energy the poor must spend thinking about their situation makes it climbing out of the hole of poverty almost impossible. 

Economic inequality is an issue that has been overlooked for far too long. It is an issue that affects our country, but also people we pass by every day.

We need to address basic needs such as food and shelter, but also psychological comfort.

The poor are simply not afforded the same mental freedom the financially secure take for granted. 

We need to provide the poor with the bootstraps to give them the mental freedom necessary to succeed.

It is only then that we can break the cycle.

­— cjellert@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Caroline Ellert on Twitter @cjellert.