I'm reading Robert E. Faris and H. W. Dunham's Mental Disorder in Urban Areas (1939) at the moment. This was pioneering work when it was published, demonstrating a very strong correlation between schizophrenia and poverty. The problem is: the authors didn't look at anything but the address at which the patient was living when hospitalized. They seem to have completely missed the possibility that people who are slipping into schizophrenia may lose their job, move into the cheapest housing possible, or end up on Skid Row (or hobohemia, as the book calls it). They seem to be so intent on proving that poverty and social disorganization cause mental illness of those who live in such places, that they don't even consider that the direction of causality is the other direction: that schizophrenics end up in poor sections of town because of their mental illness.
And yet, in the chapter on syphilitic insanity, they acknowledge that the distribution of home addresses of this bunch might be connected:
The possibility, however, must be considered that persons with syphilis eventually lose their earning power, find it impossible to compete successfully with other members of their respective occupational groups, and consequently tend to drift into the low-income groups. [p. 124]Well, duh! But they seem to have completely missed this possibility involving schizophrenia and alcohol-related psychoses. (To their credit, I understand that their 1965 edition of this book reversed their position.) It does show how strongly the whole 1930s mindset prevented people from seeing anything but, "Poverty causes bad things" rather than, "Bad things cause poverty."
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