One of the key questions in health economics is what is the direction of causality: does poverty cause poor health outcomes; does low education cause poor health outcomes; does poor health result in lack of productivity; does poor health cause poor educational and income outcomes; and how is this all related to mental health if at all. We are used to breaking down data into fragments as researchers: an investigator who is predominantly focused on health outcomes will approach the problem with disease as the dependent variable and income as the conditioning variable. However, if we are interested in income inequality we will reverse the direction and income will be the dependent variable with health status as the conditioning variable.
The representation above allows us to visualize data as a function of multiple fragments. For example, if we want to understand how depression is related to income, one can look at the figure to observe that with lower income there is a higher likelihood of being depressed. With this simple illustration, we can see that establishing causal links can be very tricky, if not incredibly challenging.
Objective
Our primary goal is to move towards establishing a causal link between binge drinking, mental health, employment, and income.