This recent study highlights how the fair world fallacy plays out in relation to mental health and poverty. If you’ve been reading here for very long, this may not surprise you, but it’s worth mentioning again:
Belief in economic fairness may fuel mental health stigma, with people showing more tolerance towards wealthy individuals with mental health struggles.
This makes sense. If you believe that society is ultimately fair, then poverty is a personal shortcoming rather than a failure of the system. If being poor is a personal shortcoming, the mental health impacts of living in poverty must also be your own responsibility to be dealt with, not a source of sympathy.
On the flip side, if you’re wealthy and struggle with mental health, that must not be your own fault because you are successful otherwise. I think we can all think of examples of wealthy people given a pass for a variety of behaviors because we equate wealth with character, with no evidence to back that up. It is just easier to accept that good things happen to good people, a wealthy person must be good, and a poor one is not so good.
This, of course, assumes that the distribution of wealth is fair, which it is not. But it sure makes it easier to think that way and to stop worrying about finding solutions to the world’s unfairness.