Boundaries

“Teenagers with mental distress come mostly from families near the boundaries between socio-economic classes ..not families who live squarely in one class or another.”   [Center for Disease Control]

This report caught my attention. I grew up in a fairly affluent, upper-middle class neighborhood ..but belonged to an income class that was closer to the bottom of the socio-economic scale. The result of a divorce settlement that kept us in a nice place but with just enough money to eat ..if we stuck with Taco Bell and beef jerky. We basically relied on the charity of sympathetic neighbors to get by. We we’re definitely living near the vicinity of different class boundaries. I was forbidden from hanging out with kids in families from my income class (according to my mom it didn’t reflect well in the neighborhood I was in) while kids in my neighborhood were discouraged from hanging out with me by their parents ..out of fear I'd become another  ‘dependent’. Now I’m not looking to assign blame here or anything. There are more than enough reasons for the ‘distress’ I felt. I was definitely a major contributor. But this article resonates. It wasn’t until I got the hell out of Dodge that my depression cleared. Economic class is a largely unspoken source of discrimination in the U.S.