Graham Isador is a writer and producer in Toronto
These are the things I have to do each week to manage my depression: exercise, drink water, go to therapy, eat nutritious food, get enough sleep, meditate, and spend time with friends or family. On occasion, I take medication to supplement that regime. Doing these things does not make my depression go away, but it does turn down the volume a bit. Nowadays I mostly wake up with a general sense of ennui rather than an active urge to destroy myself.
If I’m being honest, there is a part of me that’s kind of annoyed the regime works at all. It betrays the notion that my internal struggles are indicative of some kind of romantic, misunderstood genius rather than a series of bad chemicals playing tricks on my brain. I also have to deal with knowing that for long stretches of my life – times when I ruined relationships, lost work, and generally struggled to get out of bed – I was not doing the things necessary to get better.
Partly that’s just how depression works. The disease strips you of your desire and ability to get stuff done, even if you objectively understand that doing stuff would improve your situation. But it is also because for a lot of my life I couldn’t actually afford to get better.
For the bulk of my 20s, I worked as a waiter. Serving tables supplemented some misguided efforts at experimental theatre and the odd confessional essay. All those things in tandem were barely enough to afford my rent and a few celebratory Pabst. The idea of putting monetary effort into self-care was a completely foreign concept. I was living off five-dollar footlongs and stealing toilet paper from work. Paying for therapy was like paying for a Jet Ski or Prada bag.
The inaccessibility of mental-health care was coupled with the stress of not having any money. Hustling to provide for yourself is mentally exhausting. Not knowing your next paycheque, even more so. While I wouldn’t conflate the stress of that time period with my diagnosed depression, it’s not as though the two things were mutually exclusive. When you’re overwhelmed by negative thoughts and just scraping together enough to live on, imagining a situation where things are different feels impossible.
A turning point came when I got a gig that nearly doubled my monthly income. The job allowed me to improve my modest lifestyle and subsequently realize there were better ways to spend my time than alternating between fits of self-hatred and worrying about cash. I found a sliding-scale therapist and began to put in some work. Looking back at the experience it’s hard not to ask: Is the best antidepressant just money?
It is true that money can’t buy you happiness, but it’s also true that it is a necessary component for all sorts of stuff that improves your mental health. The salary from the job alleviated some everyday problems right away. That helped create the momentum that led to the aforementioned routine. While I give myself some credit for putting in the effort, there is no way I would have been able to improve my situation without cash. Bootstrapping wasn’t possible without some bases covered already.
For registered psychotherapist Bronwyn Singleton, the relationship between mental health and money is something she considers continually in her practice.
“The past two years have definitely underscored how financial precariousness contributes to anxiety, depression, and various other mental-health challenges. When people are financially stressed, it hits the first rung of Maslow’s hierarchy. It puts basic needs like food and shelter at risk and we’re hard-wired to feel anxious when our basic survival needs are threatened,” she said.
“That precariousness can undermine feelings of control, agency, and autonomy, but also authenticity. It’s a short step to see how financial instability can contribute to poor self-worth, feelings of sadness, and disconnection.”
So are poor people with mental-health issues just kind of screwed? Doomed to an ouroboros of stressing about the rent and the rent stressing them out? Are they supposed to just cross their fingers and hope for some kind of lucky break?
While solving these problems is above both my pay grade and area of expertise, pushing for better solutions is something we all need to do if anything is going to change. Mental illness costs Canadians $1,400 a person each year. Policies such as guaranteed basic income and specific government spending toward mental-health affordability could help lower that number.
Still, thinking about people’s lives and well-being in the context of the economy feels crass. We should try to make things better because it’s the right thing to do, not just because it would help save dollars and cents.
I’m not naive enough to think depression can be automatically fixed by throwing cash at it. But thinking that some day your mental health is just going to magically improve without making changes in your life is equally naive. The important thing is giving people the resources to make those changes and push them in the right direction.
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