Native Americans’ Experience of Chronic Distress in the USA

David Blanchflower and Donna Feir

No 29119, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Four million Native Americans who identify as single race live in the USA. Another three million identify as Native American in combination with another race. Yet they are rarely the focus of detailed research. We provide the first evidence that levels of consistently poor mental health, or chronic distress, among Native peoples were greater in every year between 1993 and 2020 than among White or Black Americans. We find this to be present among those over the age of thirty but less so for the young. Over time we demonstrate there has been a rise in chronic distress among Native Americans and multi-race individuals. However, chronic distress seems to be lowest among Native peoples living in the seven states with the largest Native American populations of Alaska, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Oklahoma. In our judgment these facts are important and not widely known. This stands in stark contrast to the enormous scholarly and media interest in declining physiological well-being among White Americans.

JEL-codes: I14 J15 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-isf
Note: LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as David G. Blanchflower & Donn. L. Feir, 2023. "Native Americans’ experience of chronic distress in the USA," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 36(2), pages 885-909, April.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29119.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Native Americans’ experience of chronic distress in the USA (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29119

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29119

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().