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Background:

Social stratification is a well-documented determinant of mental health. Traditional measures of stratification (eg, socioeconomic status) reduce dynamic social processes to individual attributes downstream of mechanisms that generate stratification. In this study, we measure one process theorized to generate and reproduce social stratification—economic exploitation—and explore its association with mental health.

Methods:

Data are from the 1983 to 2017 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a nationally representative cohort study (baseline N= 3059). We operationalized “unconcealed exploitation” as the percentage of individuals’ labor income they were hypothetically not paid for productive hours. We ascertained psychologic distress and mental illness with the Kessler-6 (K6) scale.

Results:

We fit inverse probability-weighted marginal structural models and found that for each unit increase in …