In Pakistan, around 24 percent of the population lives below the national poverty line. Poverty affects the health and poor can hardly meet their daily needs and many of them die every year due to poverty.
Poverty has a great impact on mental health as well as the physical health of the human being. Food is a basic need of people but when it does not gets fulfilled a person faces severe health issues due to starvation and hunger. Every person needs a home to live, proper food to eat and clothes to wear, and when these basic human needs are not provided then the poor start facing many physical and mental health disorders.
Expensive hospitals and expensive medicines are some of the big reasons affecting the poor’s health. These poor people are not able to have treatment from hospitals or buy medicines and therefore they end up going to quack doctors and peers who charge fewer fees and make them their regular clients. They make the poor even sicker with their superstitious treatments.
Another main factor is the mental health issue of the unprivileged poor. All human beings are born the same with life desires and future hopes. The rich people get their desires fulfilled with money and on the other hand, the poor are not able to have their essential needs met. They are not even able to provide food for their children. When a poor’s child demands some toy, the parents cannot afford it. When the parents desire to educate their child, they have no resources to admit the child into an educational institute. The inability to afford anything, strive for the basic needs and seeing other people thrive leads the poor to mental disorder. The poor suppresses all his desires and ambitions to the extent that he stops thinking for the betterment of his life rather he adapts to the conditions and learns to stay in depression. Every year, thousands of helpless poor commit suicide in Pakistan. Extreme depression and mental disorder lead them to commit such acts.
Joblessness is the main reason behind people falling below the poverty line in Pakistan. Pakistan has limited jobs for which a person keeps on trying but fails. Many unemployed people in country are facing poverty. Even though many have an educational degree but that degree is useless when they are not able to get employed even on merit.
Politicians, bureaucrats, and landlords are ruling the country and they do not care about the helpless poor of the country. Every year, many poor people die of poverty but no action has been taken. Poverty is causing many issues in human health. A poor person cannot afford the treatment because he has very fewer resources.
Poverty affects health due to the drugs use and they contract diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and cancer. Many diseases like malaria and water-borne diseases occur due to having no access to clean water and a clean environment. The poor are left to die with no government framework in place for the betterment and welfare of the neglected section of the society.
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