The Role of Mental Health on Debt Management

We treat debt like a math problem, but Bruce shows how mental health often lies at the core of financial struggle.

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How, how are people getting in this trouble right now? I mean, we talked about the cost of living being through the roof.

We’ve talked about the draw of credit, the availability of credit. Is it the same old, same old people just can’t fight off temptation? Do they run into a tough time in their personal life? Like what leads them to this situation?

It’s all those things, but here’s where we start. We start with the view that debt is not the problem. Debt’s never the problem. Debt’s the symptom. So if debt’s the symptom, what’s the problem? And it’s all the things that you’ve already said. The thing that I would underline is very often there is a mental health issue, and I don’t mean Big M mental health like you know, clinical depression or clinical anxiety necessarily, but there’s some dynamic that is around someone’s mental health.

Maybe it’s undiagnosed or untreated, ADHD. For example, maybe it’s substance abuse. Uh, there’s just a whole bunch of other things and I think how our logical and linear minds, uh, approach this is, you know, you know, we would think pay yourself first. How hard is that? Just do that. Well, people don’t do that for a lot of different reasons, a lot, a lot, a lot of different reasons.

And it’s not just the knowledge of that, like they didn’t read your book. They don’t know that. There’s a whole bunch of other things going on.

Yeah, that’s all interesting and I couldn’t agree with you more. You brought up a ADHD, and you know, I’m a guy who over you know, the years, because The Wealthy Barber came out when I was so young, I’ve seen tens of thousands of people’s plans, spending summaries, et cetera. ADHD plays a much bigger role in getting people in financial trouble than many realize.

Although I will say there’s been some good studies on it recently in the States that have finally come out and said, wait a second, we may not have recognized the behavioural issues are flowing from this more often than we thought.

Yeah.

I thought that was interesting. You brought it up. So you’re seeing a lot of that there.

Yeah.

That lack of focus, impulse buying, all of it.

All the things. Uh, and I’m a parent with a kid with ADHD, so I have a much stronger awareness of how that particular neurodiversity manifests itself. And you think, right, people with ADHD often have a very hard time completing something. So they’re great at starting. They have a hard time completing.

Well, when you think about taxes, it’s a horrendous task. I hate the task. It takes some time. How do you get closure on that? How do you set up the automatic withdrawal for your TFSA or your RRSP? Those task oriented things, once they’re set up, they can operate without a lot of oversight. But for someone who’s neurodiverse, there’s just a ton of different things, um, that make it really hard.