Indicator
Relationship between living in overcrowded homes and mental health
Published
1 July 2024
Last updated
11 December 2024
Time to read
About 2 mins
About 2 mins
Key points
- In 2022, 23% of people living in overcrowded housing indicated that they had experienced psychological distress, compared to 21% living in non-overcrowded housing. The difference was more pronounced in 2019 and 2020.
- More people overall have been reporting poor mental health since 2019. This could be due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Living in an overcrowded home tends to be associated with worse mental health. This could be due to the fact that people have less privacy and there is a greater risk of conflict in their household.
This chart shows the proportion of people experiencing at least some psychological distress between 2018 and 2022, and whether they lived in an overcrowded household or not.
- More people overall reported experiencing poor mental health in 2019, 2020 and 2021 compared to 2018 and 2022. This could be due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- In 2020, among people experiencing at least some psychological distress, the difference between people living in overcrowded and non-overcrowded homes was 4 percentage points.
- In 2021, the difference between the two decreased to 2 percentage points. This change was primarily driven by an increase in people experiencing psychological distress in non-overcrowded households. This increase may have been caused by the pandemic and its effects.
- In 2022, the difference increased again to 2.6 percentage points. This was primarily driven by a decrease in people experiencing psychological distress in non-overcrowded households.
- The GHQ-12 assessment tool is a recognised indication of a person’s mental health. It includes 12 questions relating to mood dysfunction, social dysfunction and loss of confidence. Each question has a four-point response scale. Where a question is answered as being worse or much worse than usual, they are given a score of one. People scoring an overall score of four or more across the 12 questions are classed as indicating psychological distress.
- Overcrowding in this context is measured by comparing the number of people in the household against the total number of rooms in the household (excluding bathrooms and kitchens). We have used this measure due to limitations in the data. It differs from other measures of overcrowding that account for the age and sex of children and the relationship status of adults to calculate a household’s bedroom requirement.
Source: University of Essex, Institute for Social and Economic Research, Understanding Society: Waves 10–13, UK, 2019–2022
