The impact of social safety nets on mental health outcomes and inequalities: a multi-method investigation

A government's welfare payments, food vouchers, or housing subsidies could be directly shaping the nation's mental health—and this PhD will test exactly how. Mental illness is not distributed evenly across society. People on low incomes, those who are unemployed, or from marginalised groups consistently experience worse mental health outcomes. Yet the programmes designed to support them—social safety nets—are rarely studied for their mental health effects. This project fills that gap by asking whether these programmes improve mental health, and whether they narrow the inequalities that drive the burden. The researcher will combine four approaches: analysing national mental health data alongside safety-net spending, comparing how different countries' programmes affect different groups, evaluating a specific policy change, and running a behavioural experiment. If the results show that stronger safety nets improve mental health and reduce inequalities, the implications are concrete. Governments could treat welfare policy as mental health policy—designing unemployment benefits, child payments, or housing support not just for financial relief but as a lever for population-wide psychological wellbeing. The findings could reshape how funders and policymakers think about upstream prevention, without requiring a single new clinic or prescription.