What if wealth inequality and neoliberalism was causing Australia’s mental health crisis through physically altering and damaging our brains? That’s the claim in research by eight academics that argues that inequality, deprivation and isolation are active forces in our society that causes neurological harm.

Wealth inequality is a public mental health crisis — it is causal, with deregulation, commodification of basic needs, enforced individualism and marketisation causing harm. The research helps overturns the mainstream narrative that the mental health crisis, chronic stress and anxiety is a personal moral failing — it is not. This harm is one of the manifestations of the system of economic exploitation.

How does the harm happen? Economic policy is not “neutral”. The decisions made by economic elites to create rules, structures and physical environments (workplaces, neighbourhoods) are the conditions under which human brains develop and function. The economy and society is structured so that daily survival for most people is as reliant as possible on profits for corporations, and forcing people to work to live.

While this blog post focuses mainly on the neurological research, I want to also state clearly that neoliberal capitalism also causes other types of physical harm: for example, inequality lowers life expectancy. In Australia, First Nations people have around a decade lower life expectancy than non-indigenous people, and people with a disability have an 17-19 year lower life expectancy compared to people with no disability. This is a real, physical toll on human life caused by the deprivation and stress that is inherent in our economic and political system.

Why is everyone in the US so stressed? Because of the extreme wealth inequality caused by neoliberalism, where technological gains favour the ultra-wealthy, and policies support endless capital accumulation instead of the needs of everyday people.

The way we earn our money decides how we think, how we vote, how we hate, and why we are stressed. The stress described by over 150,000 people in the US is not an abstract emotional state but a direct physiological reaction to the real, physical contradictions of US plutocracy. [More]

There is a strong argument that free-market deregulation, which drives and worsens systemic inequality create the damaging, chronic environmental stressors that actively damage our brains as children and adults.

Our brains, both as children when we are developing, and as adults, are shaped and impacted by what our environment is like. Childhood circumstances like poverty, stress, destitution, or affluence, security and comfort, have physical consequences for the parts of the brain that are central to memory, emotion, executive control and even brain size.

When essential needs are turned into commodities for corporations to profit from, material deprivation is the result. For example in Australia, housing is treated as a speculative asset rather than shelter — this means the basic human need for a house becomes subject to profit maximisation by banks and property developers — and therefore millions of people experience chronic, ongoing biological stress.

Psychological stressors occur when workers lose autonomy over their time and face persistent job unreliability. Workers in gig or casualised employment endure unpredictable chronic stress — although this is not something only gig workers experience. Workers in more traditionally stable, well-paid occupations — such as managers, healthcare workers, and academics — also suffer high levels of anxiety and mental stress. This is for the same reasons as precarious gig workers: limited control over work paired with the implicit threat of unemployment and destitution from events like corporate restructures or recessions.

Chronic stress is proven to impair brain structure and mood regulation. The austerity of neoliberalism, especially the purposeful dismantling of stable work structures and attacks on unions worsens the isolation of workers and destroys the relational networks that would normally help reduce psychological stress.

The ACTU’s long-running “Work Shouldn’t Hurt” survey of work health and safety shows that stress and work has increased and is worse for women workers. In 2023, almost 40 percent of workers were regularly or always experiencing workplace stress, and in 2025 21 percent of all workers in Australia experienced a work-related mental health injury.

Unpredictable, chronic, mild stress is a hallmark of most modern workplaces, especially where workers have relatively little control or autonomy. This is treated by our brains as continuous, low-grade threat that alters our brain chemistry and causes higher levels of anxiety and damages our ability to experience pleasure and happiness. Ultra-competitive workplaces, where cooperation and sharing are discouraged or absent, also directly degrades dopamine reward signalling, blunting motivation and mood.

Basically, work under neoliberalism makes us miserable, unhappy and anxious.

Humans are fundamentally hyper-social creatures, but neoliberalism enforces individualism and competition over collective cooperation. This dismantles community ties and collective organisations like unions. Structural isolation impairs the brain’s dopamine reward signalling systems, which alters the brain structure and neurochemistry. We register this as ongoing, long-term stress.

Neoliberal social policy enforces punitive “mutual obligation” — people who need welfare support are stigmatised as failures and a drain on society. This austerity, where already vulnerable people are discriminated against forces people into persistent, high-threat neural states. In short, it means the government subjects people on welfare to harmful deprivation and isolation that causes and worsens mental health.

The “low” status of being on welfare causes mental distress.

I’ve written about the social implications of this: ressentiment and the “fear of falling” caused by an intense mix of envy, humiliation, and powerlessness, and driven by the real, material conditions of precarity and exploitation. Fear of falling into the permanent, stigmatised underclass is not only a powerful tool of social control used by economic elites, but it actively causes mental harm.

Australian policies that normalise wage stagnation and income precarity create stressful uncertainty that forcing our brains to continuously adapt to a constant sense of being under threat. Submitting to this toxic economic and social system — to the threats of working to avoid starvation, poverty and homelessness where social welfare has been dismantled — is a rational response.

For decades, we’ve known that social and economic disadvantage causes measurable physical harms to the developing brains of children. This was one of the driving motivations behind Bob Hawke’s famous 1990 “no child will live in poverty” pledge. Deprivation before adolescence is linked to reduced cortical surface area (brain size) and slower growth of myelin markers that are vital for brain cells to effectively function.

What does this mean? Inequality within a neoliberal economy negatively impacts the brain structure of the children who are disadvantaged.

Neoliberal capitalism goes further than just causing stress and anxiety through deprivation and austerity. It also actively engineers addiction for profit.

For example, additives are chemically engineered to artificially increase the addictive properties of consumables — ultra-processed food and high levels of added refined sugar and fat is a sinister example, but in years past menthol was added to cigarettes to make the nicotine bind more effectively and become even more addictive.

Did you know that one of the world’s largest cigarette company, Philip Morris, bought transnational food conglomerate Kraft and General Foods? The tobacco industry is using the same profit-maximising addictive corporate practices on our food as they pioneered with cigarettes.

Silicon Valley social media mega-corporations like Facebook and Tiktok, but also video gaming companies, also weaponise the neuroscience of addiction. Specifically, they manipulate how our dopamine systems respond to unexpected events to design “variable schedules of reinforcement” — the same systems used in pokie machines and gambling that create “psychological cravings”.

Like gambling, which physically alters the brain’s structure and makes people more susceptible to depression and anxiety, social media use has been linked to depression and its potential to have an adverse psychological impact on users cannot be overlooked or underestimated. [Source]

In fact, far from reducing loneliness and isolation, children and teenager who are more “digitally connected” and spend more time online are lonelier and have higher rates of depression, anxiety and stress. The commodification and monetisation of social connection worsens peoples’ health.

From social media doom-scrolling to sugar-filled ultra-processed foods, massive transnational corporations are actively designing systems that manipulate our dopamine systems. Neoliberal capitalism creates false needs and integrates the economic domination of workers and everyday people into our daily habits and consumption. The cost is our physical and mental health, and in many cases our financial wellbeing.

Behind these systems of harm is the ideology of neoliberalism and the economic structure of capitalism.

The economic ideology of neoliberalism created the fabricated “homo economicus” that almost all mainstream economics relies on — a non-existent individualised, isolated, entirely self-interested person only interested in maximising personal utility.

This economic framing has had real, serious implications for how our society operates and responds to mental health crises. For example, it means that most mental health issues are treated as individual and isolated. People struggling to adapt to a fundamentally unhealthy and toxic society are labelled as maladjusted.

Mainstream mental health advice reinforces the toxic self-interested “rational” human as as the definition of a healthy human. Mentally healthy is presented to us all as being able to live in an economic system that is harmful. Mental distress is then commodified and sold individual treatments while ignoring toxic economic conditions.

The dominant neoliberal approach to mental health and social ills has been to say that you are defective, irrational or immoral if you object to exploitation and deprivation. This narrative justifies further harmful, punitive measures — cuts to support programs, “mutual obligation” welfare programs, surveillance and robo-debt, coercive work-for-the-dole and so on.

Addressing wealth inequality in Australia is an absolute necessity. True mental health reform requires de-commodifying housing, strengthening public healthcare, restoring job security, and guaranteeing strong, genuine welfare programs.

What this research, in my mind, ultimately shows is that without material security, human dignity is almost impossible to achieve for us all. Universal public investment, services, full employment, widespread unionisation, local mutual and collective institutions, wealth taxes and land taxes are all absolutely vital. Especially stronger unions, which help create “thick” social, economic and civic bonds between diverse groups of workers.

And the research also shows that economic policy physically impacts on our brains. Government decisions and corporate decisions about social programs, employment, workplaces and education are not “neutral”. Welfare cut and market deregulation are political choices that decide who is harmed.

Finally, I want to warn against determinism. There is a dangerous idea that because poverty causes mental harm to people, that those people then lose agency and that we must rely on elites to make decisions. Brains heal and in my view the more democracy — the more everyday people made the important decisions for themselves — the better.

Ultimately, humans are not solely individualised, atomised nervous systems. The harm caused by neoliberalism and extreme capitalism on our brains is bad — but is not the sole or even main reason to oppose inequality or demand political changes. The mental health crisis, the harm to our brains is one of many real, damaging consequences of capitalism and neoliberalism. And I want to emphasise that we shouldn’t focus on responding to this crisis with a medical response to what is fundamentally stress caused by political decisions made by humans. People aren’t passive rats in a cage — we have agency and the collective ability to change things. Just taking anti-anxiety meds on a society-wide level would be utterly inadequate.