(Volume 4) - Mental Health Disorders - Vula - University of Cape Town

I. MULTIPLE DEPRIVATION (back to summary)Although the Western Cape is seen as a relatively “wealthy” province,provincial aggregates are known to mask gross disparities in employmentrates and income among sub-groups. In Cape Town, for example, more than30% of the population live below the Household Subsistence Level(Department of the Premier, 2006:22). According to the latest ProvincialEconomic Review and Outlook (PERO, Western Cape Provincial Treasury,2006), 26.3% of people in the Western Cape were unemployed in 2004, withmore females unemployed than men (29.6%, compared to 23.4%), and withthe majority of the unemployed being less than 34 years of age.Furthermore, a predicted trend in rising unemployment has been coupled withan established increase in the loss of motivation to actively seek work: thenumber of “discouraged work seekers” was seen to double between 2000 and2004 (Western Cape Provincial Treasury, 2006).According to Townsend (1987), poverty can be distinguished from deprivationas follows.Poverty refers to the lack of resources required to obtain the conventionalnorms of nutrition, clothing, housing, and basic services, as well as theusually healthy environmental, educational, working and social conditions,activities, and facilities, which characterise a normal society.Deprivation on the other hand, refers to the unmet needs themselves.The poor can thus be considered as multiply deprived where they have unmetneeds in more than one domain. A good example of this is the PERO finding(Western Cape Provincial Treasury, 2006) that more than 45% of peopleliving in informal dwellings were unemployed, compared to less than 25% ofpeople in formal housing. As such, people in informal dwellings have unmetneeds in terms of income, employment and housing, each with theirattendant health risks, and can be said to be multiply deprived. How onedefines the various domains of deprivation is debatable. The South AfricanMultiple Deprivation Index study (Noble et al, 2006) makes use of fivedomains:1. income and material deprivation;2. employment deprivation;3. health deprivation;4. education deprivation; and5. living environment deprivation.29