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Old 05-08-2023, 03:06 PM
 
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More to add to this thread . . .

Story in the NY Times on 03 May 2023 about how those less educated seem to suffer more pain than college educated, and key point, the physical pain seems to at least partly stem from negative mental feelings.

The article focuses on Bobby, a 43-year-old woman who has had a tragic life, starting at age 5 when her parents divorced, marrying at 16 and twice a mother by 18. (Her story could be a twin tale for much of what my own sister Bobbi also suffered, from many of the same type of events.) Along the way she suffered much emotional trauma and much pain that led to many trips to doctors who removed bits and pieces of her body (full hysterectomy at age 21) but never solved the chronic pain. The life of a young man is also chronicled with trauma and abuse being hallmarks of his young life.

It's a long article but I've excerpted key sections to highlight that many deaths of despair seem to result from chronic pain caused by bad emotions that affect the lesser educated among us.

This link might get you past the NY Times paywall: https://dnyuz.com/2023/05/03/why-ame...eel-more-pain/

Excerpts:

"Here’s what we do know: Tens of millions of Americans are suffering pain. But chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families."

"This essay is the first in an occasional series I’ll be writing about the interrelated crises unfolding in working-class America. I’ll explore the cluster of tightly woven problems that hold back our people and our country: childhood trauma, educational failure, addiction, mental health issues, homelessness, loneliness, family breakdown, unemployment — and, we increasingly recognize, physical pain."

“People’s lives are coming apart, and this leads to huge increases in physical pain,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who with Anne Case popularized the term “deaths of despair.”

"...chronic pain sometimes, not always, originates in the brain rather than the body. ... chronic pain often reverberates in parts of the brain that can also be involved in emotions and traumatic memories, ..."

"Medicines that work very well for acute pain, like opioids, were prescribed for many years for chronic pain ... resulting in a tsunami of addiction that now claims more than 100,000 lives a year in overdoses of various drugs — ... some experts also believe that opioids were never a sound choice for long-term pain."

"Chronic pain is unusual among diseases of despair in that it disproportionately strikes women, who according to one study are 75% more likely than men to report severe pain....One study found that poor Americans are more than three times as likely to report pain as wealthy Americans. Another found that just 2% of those with graduate degrees report severe pain, while almost 10% of high school dropouts do."

At this point I'm starting to see that mental stresses on the lesser-educated from living paycheck to paycheck, finding work, paying the bills, suffering setbacks and a hundred other disappointments causes physical pain that prescription opioids failed to fix with few resources available to help them. The result is 100,000 annual overdose deaths and the untold sorrow for the families left behind. Having grown up in poverty I know that internal gnawing to make it all go the hell away. Millions of the lesser educated start out behind the 8-ball and without any learning after high school are ill-equipped to overcome issues that the better educated know how to resolve, where to get help, and have healthcare insurance to pay for it.
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Old 05-09-2023, 07:46 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike from back east View Post
More to add to this thread . . .
...
Too long to quote the whole thing, but the argument is tenuous as best. At the most they've postulated a possible correlation but not causation. It starts off describing a woman who got pregnant at 16. So many of these stories start off the same way. That will dampen the possibilities of any kind of education, college or not, as well as getting started in any kind of career job. Right off the bat it's set a path where lack of a college education is a result and not a cause. Yet the article and post then tries to argue the reverse using an emotional argument.
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Old 06-09-2023, 09:56 AM
 
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Got some new info, this time from The Atlantic.

Excerpts from The Atlantic:

"Even before COVID-19 arrived on our shores, the consequences of all this were catching up with us. From 1999 to 2017, the number of alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. doubled, to more than 70,000 a year—making alcohol one of the leading drivers of the decline in American life expectancy. These numbers are likely to get worse: ...."

The article says Millennials, who once shunned alcohol, are now getting liver disease at high rates and directs us to this NY Times article which states "More Americans Are Dying of Cirrhosis and Liver Cancer: Death rates from both diseases have risen sharply, particularly among young adults over the last decade. A possible villain: the Great Recession."


Excerpts from NY Times:

"From 1999 to 2016, annual cirrhosis deaths increased by 65 percent, to 34,174, according to a study published in the journal BMJ. The largest increases were related to alcoholic cirrhosis among people ages 25 to 34 years old. From 2009 to 2016 there was a 10.5 percent annual increase on average in cirrhosis-related mortality among people ages 25 to 34. Cirrhosis, irreversible scarring of the liver, has many causes, including alcohol consumption, obesity, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and hepatitis. Cirrhosis can lead to liver cancer and liver failure, both of which can be fatal."

The Times says that death rates increased from Whites, Blacks, and Native Americans, while death rates declined for Asians and Pacific Islanders. No mention of Hispanics, but I will assume they are counted in the White population.

Death rates increased most in the South and least in the Northeast; mirroring education levels of those areas, i.e., higher in the Northeast, less so in the South.


Back to the Atlantic article, it has some interesting historical info. Some examples are that the Pilgrims were booted off the Mayflower at Plymouth because the ship's crew was afraid of running out of beer and wanted to get back to Europe for more. In a few months the Pilgrims were making their own beer and buying wine and liquor from Europe. In 1758, George Washington got elected to Virginia's House of Burgesses by giving 144 gallons of booze to voters to swing their votes to him. George later assured his Continental Army troops got a liquor ration and even opened his own distillery after the Revolution. "By 1830, the average American adult was consuming about three times the amount we drink today." Wow. The article talks about a place in Turkey, 10,000 years ago, specifically constructed to brew alcohol and the remains of the site are adorned with wall art depicting ancient people getting hammered.


Much more in both articles. What I take from the articles is that more people are dying from alcohol, these are counted among the deaths of despair, and the lesser educated regions are suffering more.
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Old 07-31-2023, 11:05 PM
 
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New data has arrived, indicating that alcohol deaths of despair are rising faster for women than for men.

This link WILL get you past the paywall at The NY Times.

You may read the entire article if you wish, and here are some key excerpts:

"A new study shows that alcohol-related deaths among women are rising at a faster rate than those among men, particularly for people 65 and older."

"Over the past 15 years, alcohol-related deaths have steadily increased in the United States and, historically, more men have died from alcohol-related causes. That’s still the case, this study shows, but the gap is narrowing. From 2018 to 2020, alcohol-related deaths increased by 12.5 percent per year for men, but by 14.7 percent per year for women. The study highlighted rising rates among older women, in particular: From 2012 to 2020, alcohol-related deaths among women 65 and older increased by 6.7 percent per year, compared with an increase of 5.2 percent per year for men in the same age range."


When the inflation rate hits 5.2% or 6.7% it's a call to arms in the Federal government to rein in what is seen as an existential economic threat, but I doubt we'll hear a peep about this latest uptrend in Deaths of Despair.
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Old 08-12-2023, 01:19 PM
 
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Deaths of Despair keep rising. Suicides reached an all-time high in 2022 (50,000). People choose suicide at a rate of 1,000 per week. To the 2022 suicides we add drug overdoses (100,000), plus homicides (26,000) to get 176,000 deaths in 2022. The sad math works out 482/day, or 20/hour, or one every 3 minutes.

Politicians expect people to 'bootstrap' themselves to success and good health without governmental assistance; it's a deliberate fail aimed at working class people who lack the wealth to fight back.

NY Times and WaPo are covering this; I expect more articles.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/b...ultPosition=17

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/b...sultPosition=3

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/b...sultPosition=9

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...440_story.html
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Old 08-12-2023, 02:46 PM
 
Location: North Carolina
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In 1758, George Washington got elected to Virginia's House of Burgesses by giving 144 gallons of booze to voters to swing their votes to him. George later assured his Continental Army troops got a liquor ration and even opened his own distillery after the Revolution. "By 1830, the average American adult was consuming about three times the amount we drink today." Wow. The article talks about a place in Turkey, 10,000 years ago, specifically constructed to brew alcohol and the remains of the site are adorned with wall art depicting ancient people getting hammered.

One of the reasons people drank alcohol rather than water back then was for health reasons, drinking water could have deadly results from dysentery, typhoid, cholera, giardia, e. coli, and more. It was much safer to drink beer and ale.

But of course Americans drink alcohol these days for reasons other than avoiding germs. Just wanted to comment on earlier generations reasons for drinking.
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Old 08-12-2023, 03:44 PM
 
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Yes, one wonders about the Founders. They drank a lot. James Madison - who was a small built man who was chronically sick- drank a pint of whisky a day as an adult. Perhaps it was to deal with his chronic depression and it was an alternative to the other treatment for depression which was bleeding.
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Old 08-12-2023, 03:52 PM
 
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Agreed that the lack of safe drinking water was a reason to drink the various fermented drinks of that era. But as sanitation has improved over time safe water has been around in urban areas for well over a hundred years. Jersey City, NJ was the first metro area to begin routine disinfection of community drinking water in 1908 from where it rapidly went nationwide. Even with millions of rural people using well water we don't hear of people becoming ill from consuming it, except for specific cases of major industrial pollutants.

These days, deaths of despair from alcohol have nothing to do with a lack of safe water.

There is a malaise upon our nation that we need to solve and it will probably require coming at it from many angles to make a serious dent in the statistics.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 10-04-2023 at 01:18 PM..
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Old 10-04-2023, 01:36 PM
 
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The authors of the original Deaths of Despair work have built upon their 2015 work with this new 37-page paper published by the NBER. It's open source, anyone can read it and since it's double-spaced it will be a quick read.

This excerpt from the Introduction says it all:

Quote:
Our story is one in which the economy has increasingly come to serve some, but not all, Americans, and where a central division is between those who do or do not have a four-year college degree. While the college wage premium has soared to unprecedented levels, James (2012), Autor, Goldin and Katz (2020), the inequality between these two groups involves much more than money. The college degree has now become “a condition of dignified work and of social esteem,” Sandel (2020), as well as a matter of life and death, with adult life expectancy rising for the college educated, and falling for everyone else, Case & Deaton (2021a).

Another excerpt:

Quote:
We see the increasing mortality and declining adult life expectancy of less-educated Americans not only as a catastrophe in its own right but as a powerful indicator that American society is not working for the majority of its population.
I translate this to say that our largely hands-off, laissez-faire capitalism is brutal at separating the haves from the have-nots.


An article in today's The Atlantic (a paywall that I can't get around for you) clued me in to the above. The article is "Nothing Defines America’s Social Divide Like a College Education" and added these thoughts:

Quote:
New research shows that having a degree helps determine not only your opportunities in life but even how long you’ll live.

Even the chances of sustaining a successful relationship now strongly depend on educational status. Beginning in 1980, “the likelihood of divorce among college-educated Americans plummeted,” as Eli J. Finkel wrote in The Atlantic. Americans without college degrees, by contrast, are now far more likely to get divorced—and far less likely to get married in the first place. As a result, college-educated Americans are much more likely to be in a stable marriage than their compatriots who did not go to college.

I was genuinely shocked by Case and Deaton’s latest research, which demonstrates how far this difference now goes, explaining why Americans die so much younger than the inhabitants of other affluent countries.

Things are not getting better.
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Old 10-06-2023, 07:35 AM
 
Location: Arizona
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I'm not sure how drowning in college debt until you're 40 qualifies as contributing to better mental health. All this among media reports that some (many?) employers are removing the college degree requirement.
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