Social status inequality and depression in Europe

It is theorized that income inequality is an indicator of status inequality and should therefore be associated with adverse health outcomes. In this article, we propose a novel way to capture status inequality more directly by measuring the distribution of self-perceived status in a society. We investigate whether status inequality in a society is associated with depression in the population. We show, first, that there is only a moderate association between subjective social status inequality and income inequality. Second, we provide evidence that depression is higher in countries with higher status inequality and that our novel measure of status inequality is more strongly associated with depression than the conventionally used income inequality measure. However, results are susceptible to influential country cases