Matthew Smith
All Rise
The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-being
By Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett
Allen Lane 324pp £20 order from our bookshop
In 1939, sociologists Robert Faris and H Warren Dunham published an epidemiological study of mental illness in Chicago. Using admissions data from Cook County psychiatric hospitals, Mental Disorder in Urban Areas demonstrated that schizophrenia was highly associated with the poor, transitory and chaotic neighbourhoods of the inner city. No matter what your race, gender or ethnicity, the more impoverished and unstable your social environment was, the more likely you were to end up in a mental institution. It is disconcerting that, nearly eighty years later, we have studies still grappling with the same issues and coming up with similar findings, yet struggling to articulate an adequate response.
To be fair, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Inner Level, as with its predecessor, the bestselling and influential The Spirit Level (2009), does not address poverty per se, but rather inequality. Whereas The Spirit Level was more exclusively epidemiological, showing that more unequal societies have higher rates of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma