M Mental health is in crisis. New figures from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) show that more and more people in Germany are suffering from depressive symptoms.
Not everyone is affected equally. Those who are poor suffer from depressive symptoms many times more often. Even if that is not exactly surprising, it should not be dismissed as an individual responsibility. The illnesses do not arise in a vacuum, but are the result of a policy of social harshness.
Care workers, tradespeople, or cleaning staff toil themselves half to death, yet still have existential anxieties, feel abandoned by the state, and slide into depression. The reason: government failure. What is needed is a caring state that also regards the mental well-being of its citizens as a political task.
The representative study “Health in Germany Today” (GEDA) by the RKI, published in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, examined the influence of socioeconomic status on the growing number of depressions in Germany between 2019 and 2024. The study shows, in short: the lower the level of education and income, the greater the burden of depressive symptoms.
While 8.4 percent of people with high income reported depressive symptoms, in the low-income group it is 32.9 percent, i.e., almost four times as many. The gap has widened considerably over the past five years, and health inequality is growing. In the high-income group it was 6 percent in 2019; in the low-income group the number has more than doubled from 16 percent.
Possible reasons for this development include the COVID-19 pandemic and the price increases following the Ukraine war, from which poorer households were more strongly affected. The polycrisis of the past years has been and remains a challenge for everyone, both socially and individually. However, people with low incomes are exposed to more stress factors and have fewer ways to cope with them.
Besides a 40-hour workweek, household and caregiving duties, there is often a lack of capacity to take care of one’s own mental health. For people with low incomes, a multitude of additional factors come into play: financial worries, physically demanding work, smaller apartments on noisy streets. Those who have more financial resources can more easily take a break or pay for private therapy, instead of undergoing a months-long and exhausting search for a therapist with a public-insurance slot.
Of course, many illnesses cannot be prevented; they often have highly individual causes. But if a third of low earners become mentally ill, that is an expression of structural inequality. More therapists who accept statutory health insurance slots are needed; there are enough therapists. However, it must not stop at treating symptoms. The recipe for the health of society is better working conditions, a good public infrastructure, and social security.
Yet the government’s austerity policies and attacks on the welfare state threaten to worsen the crisis and disproportionately affect those who keep the shops running day after day.
The figures from the RKI should be an alarm signal. Unfortunately, there is reason to fear that the federal government will not heed it and that society will continue to cool further.
