Abstract
Living in poorer economic circumstances is routinely associated with poorer mental health throughout the life course. In adolescents, explanatory theories have almost exclusively focused on the role that economic circumstances have on parenting behaviors, and the resources families can provide for their children, which in turn influence adolescents’ mental health outcomes. Through a systematic search of mediation studies and expert consultation we propose candidate causal mechanisms through which economic circumstances might impact adolescents’ internalizing mental health outcomes such as anxiety and depression. Most of the candidate causal mechanisms we identified have not been considered in adolescent-specific theories of health inequalities to date and many have not been empirically investigated within mediation studies, indicating clear limits in current awareness of the processes through which economic circumstances affect adolescents’ mental health. We propose a conceptual model that highlights how economic circumstances may shape environmental and material factors, which we theorize in turn influences an interconnected set of behavioral, biological, psychological and social mechanisms linked to mental health outcomes.