Honestly I don’t know what’s going on in the USA. You’re so proud of your “democracy and freedom” yet one of your 2 political parties is able to effectively dismantle the entire thing in less than a decade. You’re now one election away from being a christofascist state.
…and yet you’re all just going to work tomorrow. You’re all doing pretty much nothing except “make sure you vote in 2024.” So I guess every 4 years you’re going to be one election away from a literal Nazi takeover?
I don’t know. Riot or something. I have no idea how you’re all coping so hard.
To bring a slightly different perspective here: we’re not coping.
Our suicide rate has increased 60% since 2011 among youth and young adults. Rates of mental illness have doubled in young people. About 1 in 5 young people in this country will experience depression.
Our rates of overdose deaths have doubled since 2011. Over 100,000 people died from drug use in this country in 2021.
One in five of our kids go hungry. One in five Americans live with mental illness.
When you look at these data they are absolutely alarming and the opposite of most other countries, whose rates are falling. We are not coping, people are just dying these “deaths of despair.”
Don’t forget how lonely people are now. There’s an initial ‘weird guy’ thing one has to get over when talking with someone unexpectedly here in the US.
“Hey, I like the style of that jacket, can I ask where you got it?” People are morose about how alone they feel, but struggle to escape the “rugged individualism” programming of this country, to where they default to feeling safer by shrinking back for a second, before realizing they can, and do, have space to honestly interact with someone else who doesn’t actually want something from them. Well, other than pleasant acknowledgement of our short existence at the same place and time.
For sure, the deaths are simply the final outcome of a vast amount of suffering that cannot accurately be measured.
The corrosion of community, friendship, and third spaces are all well documented sociological phenomena that our country has yet to sufficiently address. Part of this is due to the decline in religious worship, which, while not a bad thing per se, does reduce a historically large source of socialization for our country. Part of this is due to the urbanization of our country over the last 30-50 years, and the hollowing out of many small towns. And of course part of it is due to the increased toxicity of our political systems, workplaces, and economic realities that limit our participation in society.
I guess all of that to say - none of this is an individual issue, it’s all systemic and part of the same sociological story. Feeling like a weird person for interacting with a stranger isn’t an isolated incident. It’s more a testament to how much has changed about our social world in the last 30-50 years.
Makes it all the more difficult to fix, the fact that these seemingly different issues overlap to cause the same outcomes.
I hate that talk is cheap, but truly, how do we fix this? Thank goodness for meetup, and for resilient cities like NYC. Small town America? Good fuckin’ luck.
In my opinion, it would require a lot of policy changes on a national level (paid family leave, basic income/safety net things like expanding WIC and food stamps, universal healthcare including mental health and drug treatment, regulating social media for teens, stopping the use of fossil fuels, etc. - the wishlist is long!) as well as local investment in things like community centers, community events, support for parents, and small business.
We have plenty of money to do all of this, our leaders just choose not to. We need better leaders and/or a better system for electing them. And at this point, I don’t know how we get better leaders when a significant proportion of the country is in a cult.
Exactly.
And also, thanks a lot for bringing it up, it’s not a touchy subject or anything.
I can’t tell if you’re joking, but apologies if this should have had a TW.
No no, i’m totally joking, you’re good.
That was really just my initial response to the sentiment of “Hey Americans, did you realize you guys are all messed up?”, like “yeah, ya think? This has been a major stressor for all of us for the last 15 years. We are in fact quite aware, but hey thanks for pointing it out anyway”.
Haha for real! At least we have some self awareness left.
They’re dying quietly, but they aren’t going unnoticed. That’s the best any of us can do…
…But I don’t think the rest of the world is doing a whole lot better.
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Well, you need a prescription for those, so people do take lots of tylenol (aka acetaminophen, aka paracetamol) or ibuprofen. The problem is, it’s too easy to get prescription for opioids, and they get prescribed for relatively little things (but not for just e.g. a headache).
That said, I feel things are changing, people and authorities are openly admitting we have a opioid crisis, and there’s more awareness of the risks, which makes me think (hope) that doctors will be a bit more concerned before prescribing them. That said, I never got prescribed one, and probably won’t use them if I did.
Policy on prescribing opiates had gotten a lot tighter in the last 7ish years. It’s unlikely to get prescribed those drugs for small pains. People got addicted before this tightening, weren’t allowed to wean off them, and now turn to street drugs instead of pharmaceuticals. Also they cutoff people with chronic pain. OD deaths actually have steadily increased despite an enormous drop in prescriptions and it’s mostly fentanyl. Fentanyl is also much cheaper than pharmaceutical opiates.
Yes. This is the result of a privatized health system where the only outcome that matters is profit. Doctors write enough opioid prescriptions each year for 46% of Americans to receive one. (Source: https://drugabusestatistics.org/opioid-epidemic/)
It’s absolute madness, but I do think the prescribing is getting better slowly. Unfortunately, the massive jumps in ODs seem very related to fentanyl taking over an illicit drug market that used to be primarily heroin and rx opiates. When I worked on national drug use surveys ~8 years ago, fentanyl was not a part of the landscape at all. Things have changed so quickly.