Callander, Emily J., and Schofield, Deborah J. (2018) Psychological distress increases the risk of falling into poverty amongst older Australians: the overlooked costs-of-illness. BMC Psychology, 6.

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Abstract

Background: This paper aimed to identify whether high psychological distress is associated with an increased risk of income and multidimensional poverty amongst older adults in Australia.

Methods: We undertook longitudinal analysis of the nationally representative Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australian (HILDA) survey using modified Poisson regression models to estimate the relative risk of falling into income poverty and multidimensional poverty between 2010 and 2012 for males and females, adjusting for age, employment status, place of residence, marital status and housing tenure; and Population Attributable Risk methodology to estimate the proportion of poverty directly attributable to psychological distress, measured by the Kessler 10 scale.

Results: For males, having high psychological distress increased the risk of falling into income poverty by 1.68 (95% CI: 1.02 to 2.75) and the risk of falling into multidimensional poverty by 3.40 (95% CI: 1.91 to 6.04). For females, there was no significant difference in the risk of falling into income poverty between those with high and low psychological distress (p = 0.1008), however having high psychological distress increased the risk of falling into multidimensional poverty by 2.15 (95% CI: 1.30 to 3.55). Between 2009 and 2012, 8.0% of income poverty cases for people aged 65 and over (95% CI: 7.8% to 8.4%), and 19.5% of multidimensional poverty cases for people aged 65 and over (95% CI: 19.2% to 19.9%) can be attributed to high psychological distress.

Conclusions: The elevated risk of falling into income and multidimensional poverty has been an overlooked cost of poor mental health.

Item ID:	53180
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2050-7283
Keywords:	income, K10, longitudinal analysis, poverty, SF36
Additional Information:	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Funders:	National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)
Projects and Grants:	NHMRC APP1052742
Date Deposited:	03 Jul 2018 05:04
FoR Codes:	38 ECONOMICS > 3801 Applied economics > 380108 Health economics @ 100%
SEO Codes:	92 HEALTH > 9202 Health and Support Services > 920206 Health Policy Economic Outcomes @ 100%
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