How Poverty Changes the Brain
July 29, 2018 1:19 AM   Subscribe

(SLAtlantic 2017) When a person lives in poverty, a growing body of research suggests the limbic system is constantly sending fear and stress messages to the prefrontal cortex, which overloads its ability to solve problems, set goals, and complete tasks in the most efficient ways. ... After years of coaching adults and watching those benefits trickle down to children, EMPath has brought children into the center of its model—offering a way out of intergenerational poverty with brain science.

This happens to everyone at some point, regardless of social class. The overload can be prompted by any number of things, including an overly stressful day at work or a family emergency. People in poverty, however, have the added burden of ever-present stress. They are constantly struggling to make ends meet and often bracing themselves against class bias that adds extra strain or even trauma to their daily lives. And the science is clear—when brain capacity is used up on these worries and fears, there simply isn’t as much bandwidth for other things.

After years of coaching adults and watching those benefits trickle down to children, EMPath has brought children into the center of its model—offering a way out of intergenerational poverty with brain science.

Elisabeth Babcock, the president and CEO of EMPath, said people in poverty tend to get stuck in vicious cycles where stress leads to bad decision-making, compounding other problems and reinforcing the idea that they can’t improve their own lives.

“What we’re trying to do is create virtuous cycles where people take a step and they find out they can accomplish something that they might not have thought they could accomplish, and they feel better about themselves,” Babcock said. Maybe that step helps them earn more money, solves a child-care problem that leads to better child behavior, or simply establishes a sense of control over their own lives. All of these things reduce stress, freeing up more mental bandwidth for further positive steps.

More on how poverty affects developing brains and the neuroscience of inequality.

Previously
posted by Bella Donna (24 comments total) 67 users marked this as a favorite
 
How about we end poverty by supporting people to have stable jobs, housing and health care? How about we use neuroscience to end systemic racism and misogyny instead? Fuxake.
posted by prismatic7 at 1:41 AM on July 29, 2018 [58 favorites]


Interesting to note that fear and stress consistently degrade critical thinking skills, is that why its all the MSM goes on about non stop?
posted by infini at 1:47 AM on July 29, 2018 [20 favorites]


One step removed from Suze "do as I say, not as I do" Orman. Being poor is not a personailty trait.
posted by Brocktoon at 4:31 AM on July 29, 2018 [5 favorites]


How about we end poverty by supporting people to have stable jobs, housing and health care?

If you're suggesting that skilled, evidence-informed mentoring is somehow not a vital part of what "supporting people to have stable jobs, housing and health" actually looks like in practical terms, then speaking as a foster parent I have to wonder just how much time you've spent around families who live with intergenerational poverty.

Being poor is not a personality trait.

Being poor is certainly not a moral failing. But If you're suggesting that it doesn't fuck with people's brains in ways that tend to leave both them and their children even poorer, then I have to wonder how much first- or second-hand exposure you've had to intergenerational poverty as well.

I don't understand why what appears to be an effective and evidence-based support program is attracting this kind of dismissive snark. Could somebody please explain what it is that I'm missing here?
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 AM on July 29, 2018 [86 favorites]


This language has everything to do with securing funding from people who want the poor reformed than providing services that someone like myself have interest in receiving while I'm dealing with a poor functioning brain. When I worked case management helping those dealing with homelessness I made a decision to not take it up as a life career path because I am making money telling people who are being tortured how to behave themselves better to meet goals that the people designing these programs could never achieve under these pressures. It's utterly ridiculous how much energy the "helping" professions spend on telling people experiencing torment how they need to behave better "for their own good" which leaves so many just feeling worse after this help because they can't achieve all the new goals they're given, and you just handed a huge helping of self judgement the person can now carry in addition to all their other burdens you did jack shit to help with.

Why is it not surprising as I look into this organization that they were affiliated with the Florence Crittenton Homes described in "The Girls who Went Away" where they took and sold the babies of the poor and the young to wealthy families in order to "help" the bad poor decision making women who got pregnant and don't deserve their children. Huh. Resiliency research is so often a tool in securing the continuation of a destructive system and to allow those who discover how much the system they are profiting from destroys their fellow humans some way to rationalize their continued participation in it, and lay the weight of the work of fixing these problems on the feet of those most destroyed and exploited.
posted by xarnop at 5:10 AM on July 29, 2018 [56 favorites]


There’s skepticism I think because descriptive often becomes prescriptive when it comes to the poor and vulnerable. It’s fine to do a study on how poverty affects the brain, and it’s fine to develop things like coaching plans based on this to help people. What’s not okay is to use this as evidence that individuals should be held accountable for systemic injustice.

The issue with poverty is large scale oppression of a majority by a minority. That’s not going to be alleviated with individual interventions. Our current economic model has led to explosive growth in economic inequality, and this is by design as it’s purpose is to enrich the few at the expense of the many. So sure, develop a coaching program because hopefully that will help people. But if that’s all you do then you’re destined to inevitably revictimize the people you’re trying to help because if they fail to thrive it will become their own fault for not trying harder, rather than the fault of an unjust system.
posted by supercrayon at 5:57 AM on July 29, 2018 [37 favorites]


I don't understand why what appears to be an effective and evidence-based support program is attracting this kind of dismissive snark. Could somebody please explain what it is that I'm missing here?

MetaFilter's cranky at the moment, I think.

Programs to help with poverty have to contend with the reality that at least some portion of the very poor will use that help to buy unnecessary luxuries instead of the things they need. It's just what happens. It's also the first thing those who don't want to spend any time or money on the poor will bring up as reasons why that safety net is a waste of time (because they're going to starve anyway in front of their nice flatscreen TV that gets stolen after three months), so if you're not ready to acknowledge that reality and have an argument ready to go for why it's okay, you're not really going to get anywhere. The neuroscience answer is just as good as any other.
posted by Merus at 6:06 AM on July 29, 2018 [4 favorites]


All of your wondering has stressed me out to the breaking point. Not having sufficient poverty credentials has caused me to take out a loan at 25%, move to an area with a liquor store on every corner, and give my kids tap water polluted with lead. What a vicious cycle of my own doing!
posted by Brocktoon at 6:22 AM on July 29, 2018 [4 favorites]


Yeah, I think there’s an unnecessary harshness to this. As someone who has both been poor and also struggled with severe PTSD that means stress can absolutely undermine my thinking, cognitive behavioral therapy that treated the PTSD was absolutely also helpful at treating poverty stress. It’s absolutely a teachable and super useful skill. Figuring out how to evaluate how likely the bad things were to happen, and how to make small plans to avoid the worst of them is helpful. Yes, it’s not going to end poverty on its own, but getting more brain capacity back also helps people do things like organize unions or navigate the complex shitty systems that already exist better.
posted by corb at 6:27 AM on July 29, 2018 [31 favorites]


While this post is wonderful discussing the academic and scientific basis of how poverty can affect brain structure, hence behaviors, and provides solutions for dealing with that very real phenomena, I remembered a series of articles in, of all media, Cracked Magazine, years ago, which first really clued me in to the practical realities of living in poverty. Eloquently parochial and hey, Cracked brow with a bit of profanity to highlight the ironies and frustrations, first, habits and habituation may be part and partial to how these struggles shape the physical realities of your thinking. Second, the follow up, with more wince inducing realities, highlights more habits and frustration molding behaviors. And then there are the numerous attendant structural barriers that, difficult to overcome, again, feedback in to the physical consequences of being poor. And god forbid, the process extends through multiple developmental stages... Rather than dismissing these insights I found them pretty informative, even coming from the likes of Cracked Magazine. Who knew they could have some insightful social observations? Insights galore.
posted by WinstonJulia at 6:35 AM on July 29, 2018 [21 favorites]


What I've noticed with friends who moved from ongoing poverty/housing-precarity/etc into stable situations is that the single most important step wasn't about their thinking, it was about stable housing, access to medical care and access to food. For a variety of reasons, both personal and non-, I absolutely believe that poverty stress borks your planning ability. However, the ability to sleep deeply because you have a decent place to sleep and you'll have it every night in the future, the knowledge that you've got enough food today and will have enough tomorrow, the ability to get your teeth fixed, etc.....those are the biggest help in fixing your thought process.

Like, I've observed a couple of people to "bounce back" from what seemed to be serious mental illness but was actually stress plus chronic, chronic sleep deprivation due to housing instability.

Therapy and "brain science" are great, but they're also one more way that "fixing poverty" is used as a jobs program for the middle class. Housing people, feeding them and giving them money generate only low-status administrative jobs, and not too many of those if the programs are simple to access. Therapy and brain science generate lots of very respectable jobs - research programs, and grants administration, and foundations to disperse the money, etc etc. Which sounds classier and a better use of a nice degree, "I process housing stipend reports for the state" or "I run a program called [FANCYNAME] where we study how poverty affects brain chemistry using an intergenerational model"?

Start with housing, feeding and treating people, then provide therapy to the ones who need and desire it once they've been sleeping and eating well for six months. Lots of people need coaching, intergenerational trauma is real, these kinds of studies are useful - but they're an attempt to bail out the ocean unless they sit on top of a large redistributive program.
posted by Frowner at 6:48 AM on July 29, 2018 [75 favorites]


I do think that there's an element of blaming the victim here, but this system won't change -- maybe not ever, and definitely not today. If individuals can manage to thrive in spite of it, that may be a more useful effort to promote than one that basically looks like people, I don't know, writing angry blog posts about how ugly society is and otherwise doing nothing to reform it.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:33 AM on July 29, 2018 [5 favorites]


Maybe someone more familiar with the history can correct me but—haven't we seen in previous MeFi discussions on the subject that the system has changed quite radically, relatively recently? That the “welfare reforms” under the Clinton administration are what shifted a large proportion of the funds spent from going directly to people, to instead going to companies providing “services”, and consequently made this kind of stuff into a goldmine whether it really improves things or not?
posted by XMLicious at 8:04 AM on July 29, 2018 [12 favorites]


at least some portion of the very poor will use that help to buy unnecessary luxuries instead of the things they need

I've got some pretty strong objections to the idea that luxuries are any less necessary for the poor than they are for those more easily able to pay for them. Once I've chosen to give money to another person, I have relinquished any right at all to dictate to them what they spend it on. Especially if they end up spending it on what I would have done myself.

What a vicious cycle of my own doing!

I don't see that kind of analysis as in any way helpful. Poverty is a structural problem that emerges from the larger ways in which a society and its economy are organized; eliminating poverty as a phenomenon, then, requires large-scale organizational change.

But there are many societies in which that kind of change has not happened and shows no real sign of happening any time soon, so poverty is real and it's right here right now, and there are people working to alleviate some of the suffering it causes on a personal and family level, and to teach skills that have been shown to help some of those people and families escape it; and if your response to those people's efforts is snark and abuse rather than any kind of helpful engagement, then I think that response is ill-considered and quite probably ill-informed.

Start with housing, feeding and treating people

Yup.

these kinds of studies are useful - but they're an attempt to bail out the ocean unless they sit on top of a large redistributive program.

That's an argument for a large redistributive program, not against evidence-based personal and family training and mentoring, and it's an argument you'll see no disagreement with from me. I have yet to encounter any well-argued objection to making the notion of fair distribution every bit as fundamental to the rules that underpin and enable the free market as the notion of private property.

If you're actually suggesting that the funds the Crittenton Women's Union spends on EMPath would be better employed as direct redistribution, I'd want to see evidence that you're better placed to make that judgement call than those who actually did make it.

It's a scale thing. What we need is fundamental alterations to the laws of the land that would actually prevent poverty emerging as a designed-in consequence of the operation of the economy. What we have is a dribble of philanthropic funding. There is a sucking chest wound in the body politic, and all we currently have available to treat it with is band-aids. There is so little use in getting all het up about perhaps having bought the wrong brand of them.

there's an element of blaming the victim here

If anybody said anything to any of the program participants like "We just spent HUGE AMOUNTS to SPLAIN YOU all this STUFF that you'd just KNOW ANYWAY if you weren't such a LOSER, so WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU STILL POOR" then yeah, that would be victim-blaming. But the only place I'm seeing any suggestion that anybody might actually be saying any such thing has been in comments on this thread.
posted by flabdablet at 8:10 AM on July 29, 2018 [23 favorites]


How about we end poverty by supporting people to have stable jobs, housing and health care?

There's a tension here that I have a little emotional trouble with, having myself grown up in foodstamp-clutching, penny-pinching abject poverty.

That is, when I see programs like this, my kneejerk reaction is exactly the above - why are they spending money on the neuroscience of this, rather than just giving poor people money? But the thing is, it's not necessarily an either/or, and it ought to be both. I don't know that the money going to this project would go directly to the impoverished otherwise; hell, it would probably go to some less altruistic neurological pursuit like the brain chemistry of marketing.

If the choices were the neuroscience of the poor gets funded, or the poor get funded directly, then I'd say defund this. And sometimes that has probably been the choice.

But it should be more like "keep this, and also maybe spend as much on housing people as you do on boner pills and fighter jets."
posted by aspersioncast at 9:15 AM on July 29, 2018 [22 favorites]


at least some portion of the very poor will use that help to buy unnecessary luxuries instead of the things they need

this is a pretty gross attitude that is unfortunately quite popular from people who feel no qualms about buying "unnecessary luxuries" for themselves. what people do and do not "deserve" to enjoy in life is not something that should be calculated by their income. that people feel comfortable shaming people in poverty for wanting nice things, or even just one single nice thing, appalls me.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:28 AM on July 29, 2018 [36 favorites]


How about we end poverty by supporting people to have stable jobs, housing and health care?

EMPath's budget is $5.8 million per year. That amount of money is a speck of dust compared to what is needed to make the US provide decent social services. So I don't think it makes sense to cast this as an either/or.

I'm glad there are a bunch of single-digit-million non-profits trying unconventional strategies to solve social problems. I have no idea whether EMPath will work, but many like it will make important contributions.
posted by andrewpcone at 9:35 AM on July 29, 2018 [8 favorites]


this is a pretty gross attitude that is unfortunately quite popular from people who feel no qualms about buying "unnecessary luxuries" for themselves. what people do and do not "deserve" to enjoy in life is not something that should be calculated by their income.

I think it's important to be charitable to our community here. While there are definitely people in the outside world who have no problem, like, gold-plating their entire house while sneering at people in poverty for having smartphones, I don't think it's a really common attitude here on Metafilter.

And honestly - the consumerism in our culture that promotes the impulse to buy certain kinds of luxuries just so our GDP can rise is a bad one for everyone, it's just particularly destructive for the poor. It's one I have myself - like, even this week, as I wonder how the hell I'm going to afford certain necessary stuff because income has gone radically down for a lot of reasons, I was contemplating spending money that I really need to pay bills with on antique hatpins. They're so cool! Ladies used to stab gropers! I could feel like a lady who could stab gropers instead of a lady beset by trouble and poverty and unionbusting! Fortunately their price went out of the range I could even pretend to myself was sane. But the thing is - even though I don't think I should be morally judged for that impulse, it still doesn't mean that impulse was good or healthy, and I know it comes because I've internalized some shitty things about our society and that I would be better off without the urge to spend literally half my weekly food budget on hatpins.
posted by corb at 9:53 AM on July 29, 2018 [10 favorites]


Working in health care in poverty, I believe you need to deal with both the material needs of people as well as the cognitive effects of years where you’ve made minute to minute survival decisions, living in chaos that you cannot control or escape. When you live in a tent and it’s freezing out and you’ve just been beaten by your partner and you have 3 dollars in your pocket, buying a 40 ouncer is absolutely a rational, predictable, and effective choice of what to do with your 3 dollars. It’s just about the only option that gets you through til tomorrow. And tomorrow, your options are just about the same. And this goes on for years.

When people (my patients at least) finally get on long term disability and into subsidized housing, they are still under a ton of stress, a little less immediate (although partially so), along with years of unaddressed trauma, and the only coping strategy remains “What is going to help me feel better right now?” And that’s a really critical need that has to be addressed before you can expect people to be able to manage money, deal with long term health problems, chemical dependency, etc. And I think “feeling better now” is a basic human right that deserves to be addressed. The problem is, if the only things you’ve ever known to make you feel better now are alcohol, ice cream, McDonald’s, or whatever, you’re going to continue to cope that way.

I think a lot of us have lived cheaply for short periods and learned to deal with no TV, no car, going to food banks. But trying to live cheaply requires a lot of planning, skill, self sacrifice, and social support. After years of struggling for survival hour to hour, finally being given the means to achieve some degree of stability, you have none of the tools that the “starving” college student, or the newly unemployed family has and unfortunately most policy makers have this false idea that housing and food stamps might be enough* for some people to survive. And when it’s not enough for those who’ve lived in generational poverty, the conclusion is just “Well, some people are just going to spend it on drugs and cable TV and fancy clothes” and as a society we’ve done as much as we can do. And honestly, if I spent years alternating between sleeping on the couch of someone who was raping me and sleeping in a tent in the rain, you bet I’m going to spend that first 10 grand on some dignity and feeling good unless I had some magic showing me how to have dignity and feel good AND planning on how to go back to school and feed my family healthy food.


*to be clear, what we are currently spending on housing and food stamps is not enough where I live. I’m unaware that there is data that gives us a magic number of financial support where people start to bring themselves out of poverty on their own without a whole lot of other interventions besides writing checks. I’m all for making the financial obstacles as easy to deal with as can be sustained by tax payers, but my point is that, at any level of spending, you still need to deal with the cognitive effects of long term poverty.

posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:03 AM on July 29, 2018 [42 favorites]


But the thing is - even though I don't think I should be morally judged for that impulse, it still doesn't mean that impulse was good or healthy

The point is that it was your impulse, and unless you're so mentally ill as to make following through on it present a clear and immediate danger to yourself or other people, nobody else has the right to decide for you whether you get to choose that rather than something they think is "better for you".

Your life, your circumstances, your priorities, your call.

I know it comes because I've internalized some shitty things about our society and that I would be better off without the urge to spend literally half my weekly food budget on hatpins

So if you decide that the ways you usually respond to impulses like these have historically been less helpful to you or your family than they could have been, an evidence-based program like EMPath might possibly teach you some internal tools for improving those reponses.

Does that mean you might end up better off for having those tools at your disposal than you would be without them? Brain research signs point to Yes.

Does that mean that being stuck in a poverty trap has somehow always been your fault? Any understanding of the operation of capitalism points to Hell No.

Nor does the mere existence of such programs make remaining stuck in a poverty trap Your Fault or Your Choice or Your Doing or Your Undeserving Moral Turpitude if you don't avail yourself of them. Given the ubiquity of rent-seeking garbage programs swarming like roaches through every service sector in the US, it would be perfectly understandable to have a well-founded disinclination to waste valuable waking hours on something that looks like it might just consist of yet another bunch of well-meaning but essentially clueless tools richsplaining all the ways you could be Winning At America if you'd only put your mind to it.

But unless somebody has got actual evidence that EMPath is indeed nothing more than just another rent-seeking garbage program, I'm not convinced that reacting to it with pure cynicism by default is justified. From what I can see of it, it looks pretty sound and appears to be run by people well placed to judge what works and what doesn't.
posted by flabdablet at 12:24 PM on July 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


Of course, redistribution is needed to reduce poverty. That's not being argued against.

But the cognitive effects of poverry and stress continue even after the poverty has been dealt with. I grew up in poverty - not deep poverty like homelessness, but enough so there were general stresses - and it still affects me in both my cognition and my habits. I now have a good education and job, but maybe this would have been better if my family had had help like this. So many other people I know would have been helped by a program like this.

It doesn't have to be an either / or. Why can't we have both?
posted by jb at 12:51 PM on July 29, 2018 [10 favorites]


I'm coming from the perspective of being fascinated by the psychology of giving.

To use a less contentious example, the Red Cross has a perverse problem in that their most effective fundraising comes after a crisis - even if, like the ebola crisis, it was entirely preventable and cheaper to deal with when the problem was small. Moreover, if the Red Cross gets surplus funds and then starts redirecting those funds to anything else, even trying to prevent a similar crisis from happening elsewhere, they've found that their donors get livid. For the donors, it's not about actually solving the problem, it's about the donors feeling like they 'helped'.

There's a fairly direct analogy to draw to welfare programs for the very poor. In this case, the preventative measures that would be cheaper in the long term would be, say, social housing (and there's some finesse to social housing programs - building social housing in 'bad' areas only encourages people to try to flee it, and having a stable place to live where you can put down roots is crucial to undoing some of the harmful effects of poverty).
posted by Merus at 5:50 PM on July 29, 2018 [9 favorites]


Like, I've observed a couple of people to "bounce back" from what seemed to be serious mental illness but was actually stress plus chronic, chronic sleep deprivation due to housing instability.

Frowner's point hit the nail on the head so well. When I began working around homeless people as a clerk in the 80s, it was conventional wisdom that the bulk of homelessness was due to deinstitionalization. and especially patient non-compliance with medication; at the time it seemed homelessness was focused on as a new phenomenon as it seemed to explode in SF at that time. While it's true severely ill folks frequently end up homeless, I couldn't help but wonder instead of being homeless because they were mentally ill, how many were mentally ill because they were homeless? The sleep deprivation, the malnutrition, constant extreme stress, probable PTSD from assaults, and general feelings of worthlessness based on society's reaction to them. To medicate them and send them back out there...they could just go down the rabbithole of misdiagnosis and bad care.

This is an excellent thread.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 11:18 PM on July 29, 2018 [7 favorites]


But the cognitive effects of poverry and stress continue even after the poverty has been dealt with. I grew up in poverty - not deep poverty like homelessness, but enough so there were general stresses - and it still affects me in both my cognition and my habits.

Sorry for the double-post, but I can relate. Chronic financial stress, including eviction, when I was an adolescent was very stressful and made it hard for me to plan well since the present seemed so chaotic. I too didn't suffer extreme poverty, but I've always thought that it would be easy to just get overwhelmed and feel that your problems would never go away and just give up hope entirely. I think that's where the whole "fail to plan for the future" factor comes in; it's often assumed that poor people are poor because they fail to plan, (which is a self-perpetuating cycle) but it's rarely discussed that poverty can make a person feel like there's nothing to plan for. If everything that the middle class enjoys seems way out of reach, then how could you feel there are actual steps to get there? And how can you take those steps when taking care of the present is exhausting?

And if you're just worrying about food for today and/or feeding your kids today, deeply thinking about the future would probably drive you into a permanent state of panic from the overwhelm of things to take care of that would make you cease to function well. I get that that's what the whole premise of the article is, but it's funny/sad how it takes neuroscience to point out something that should be intuitively obvious.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:39 PM on July 30, 2018 [5 favorites]


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