Mental money

Alstroemeria: (alstroemeria apollo) a symbol of wealth, prosperity and fortune

People with mental health issues are three times as likely to be in debt, according to Money and Mental Health. Conditions like depression and anxiety don’t just impact our emotions—they can affect the way our minds work. Our ability to rationalise, communicate and understand financial admin can be compromised.

People experiencing depression, for example, describe it like seeing through a fog—making it harder to weigh up and process complicated information. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can impact short-term memory, which makes remembering pin codes and passwords a struggle. If your anxiety is so bad you can’t leave the house, you’re unlikely to be able to call to cancel a service or even face opening your banking app.

When mental health suffers, spending tends to go up while income comes down, and our ability to cope compounds this. On top of that, it’s easy to get trapped in a vicious cycle: your mental health sees you rack up some debt, the debt stresses you out and makes your mental health problems worse, you try to treat the mental health, and get yourself into more debt.

There’s a reason we call it ‘retail therapy’. Buy something you want, and you get a rush of endorphins which temporarily boost your mood. Impulse control goes out the window when we’re suffering from anxiety, depression, and stress. When people self-medicate with alcohol, it gets even worse. Along with regularly ‘treating’ ourselves, losing impulse control can make us overly generous to others as we chase the dopamine hit. People spend money they don’t have on gifts for people they care about, in response to low self-worth or feelings of being a burden or a drain: women suffering from postnatal depression often buy things for their baby to compensate for their negative feelings. Experts call this ‘social value spending’.

Money can’t buy happiness, but that doesn’t stop people trying, and with the self-care industry pushing its ‘spend money on pretty things’ message, it’s understandable we find ourselves tempted by overpriced luxury goods to try and make ourselves feel better. Unfortunately, impulsive spending can’t fix a mental illness and it certainly shouldn’t replace real therapy.

Then there’s the day-to-day expenses of mental health problems beyond the extravagant expenditure in the shopping mall.

If you’ve got any kind of illness, the chances are, you need medication to treat it—the same goes for mental health problems. Live in the United States, and even with insurance, you’ll be looking at a co-pay to visit your GP to get a prescription, and in some places, the medication you need won’t be covered by your insurance provider so that’ll come out of pocket. Need to see a therapist, and you’re looking at an appointment fee even if your insurance covers it—co-pays can be brutal. If you live somewhere with a national health service, your appointments may be free, but you’ll still have to cover a prescription charge—while this may be low, unlike an injury or a physical disease, there’s no being ‘cured’ for many mental illnesses. You can manage it, you can cope with it, and you can treat your way to balance, but you’re still looking at a lifetime of treatment costs. This is true for many people suffering anxiety or depression, but those dealing with schizophrenia, addiction, or borderline personality disorder may have to add costs for in- and out-patient facilities over their lives; the cost for which can be astronomical.

Not only do doctor appointments sometimes require you to take time out of your working day—or worse, use up holiday—but mental health can leave you paralyzed at work. Suffer a panic attack and your productivity (obviously) plummets; spend all day in a depressed fugue and data on a spreadsheet starts to swim; the slightest distraction is often enough to derail work efforts when you’re feeling terrible. Reduced productivity gets noticed and suddenly, your career progression and even your job are at risk.

Reduced productivity also means you won’t have the drive or motivation to pursue your dreams and goals. You won’t go for a raise if you can’t bring yourself to have that conversation; you won’t leave the job sapping your soul if you don’t have the energy to look for a new job; you won’t volunteer for anything if it’s all you can do to drag yourself to work in the first place. Opportunities slip away as your mental health drains you of the will to try.

Spoon Theory is an excellent explanation for opportunity cost: the theory offers a visual representation of your energy for the day in the form of spoons. If you only have three spoons for the day, you have to prioritize their usage. You spend one on getting out of bed, another on brushing your teeth, and the third on getting dressed: zero spoons leftover for being productive or proactive or any of the other pro-adjectives. Once you’ve used them up, you find yourself too exhausted and drained to push through, and you only earn spoons through rest and proper self-care. Take the medication you need and you grant yourself extra spoons: these spoons and therefore units of energy they represent can then be used to tackle the rest of life, from seeing friends to going to work.

Even then, when you’ve got all the spoons you need, there may be one thing holding you back still: fear of stigma. It’s only recently that employers have started to open up to people with mental health issues and provide support rather than discrimination, but the stigma persists and fear of it can be crippling. ■