Abstract
Money made the headlines in 2011. Across the Western world the effects of recession were felt. Businesses were forced into administration, leaving thousands out of work. Riots over financial cuts took place Europe, bringing political change and government overthrow. In Tunisia, a young man's poverty led Mohamed Bouazizi to self-immolate, and in doing so sparked the 'Arab Spring', a revolution that has dramatically altered the face of the modem world.Yet for many of us, life has not changed much. There is less money to go around, but still enough to live comfortably. We sit far enough above the breadline to be buffered from the severest effects of poverty: physical, social and psychological. As Clinical psychologists, however, we regularly encounter individuals experiencing material poverty, both those who are newly encountering this land of hardship and those who have grown up inhabiting it. How we formulate the effects of poverty on mental health and mental ill-health, and how we intervene to assist in this social problem (far beyond the scope of our clinical practice), is explored in this essay. The first section considers the context of poverty on mental health, illness and wellbeing; the second explores psychological frameworks that can be assist with the impact of poverty on individuals' and communities' mental state.One recurrent difficulty encountered here was how to adequately incorporate the 'service user' view of this problem, as no one is ever referred to NHS psychiatric services diagnosed as suffering from 'poverty'. Examples of the service user voice have therefore been drawn from wide-ranging sources and do not necessitate that the individual has received NHS psychiatric care.