Since the end of World War II, the only close
competitor to the current moment is the multipronged
unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s: serial
assassinations of political leaders, mass civil
rights and anti-war protests, sustained riots, fury
over a heinous war in Indochina, and the resignation
of a corruption-plagued president.
But those events unfolded and built upon one
another over the course of a decade. By crucial
contrast, the current confluence of crises, each of
historic significance in their own right — a global
pandemic, an economic and social shutdown, mass
unemployment, an enduring protest movement provoking
increasing levels of violence and volatility, and a
presidential election centrally focused on one of
the most divisive political figures the U.S. has
known who happens to be the incumbent president
— are happening simultaneously, having exploded one
on top of the other in a matter of a few months.
Lurking beneath the headlines justifiably
devoted to these major stories of 2020 are very
troubling data that reflect intensifying
pathologies in the U.S. population — not moral
or allegorical sicknesses but mental, emotional,
psychological and scientifically
proven sickness. Many people fortunate enough to
have survived this pandemic with their physical
health intact know anecdotally — from observing
others and themselves — that these political and
social crises have spawned emotional
difficulties and psychological challenges.
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But the data are nonetheless stunning, in terms of both the depth of the social and mental health crises they demonstrate and the pervasiveness of them. Perhaps the most illustrative study was one released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month, based on an extensive mental health survey of Americans in late June.
One question posed by researchers was whether
someone has “seriously considered suicide in the
past 30 days”— not fleetingly considered it as a
momentary fantasy nor thought about it ever in
their lifetime, but seriously considered
suicide at least once in the past 30
days. The results are staggering.
For Americans between 18-24 years old, 25.5
percent — just over 1 out of every 4
young Americans — said they had. For the much
larger group of Americans ages 25-44, the
percentage was somewhat lower but still
extremely alarming: 16 percent. A total of 18.6
percent of Hispanic Americans and 15 percent of
African Americans said they had seriously
considered suicide in the past month. The two
groups with the largest percentage who said yes:
Americans with less than a high school degree
and unpaid caregivers, both of whom have 30
percent — or almost 1 out of every 3 — who
answered in the affirmative. A full 10 percent
of the U.S. population generally had seriously
contemplated suicide in the month of June.
In a remotely healthy society, one that
provides basic emotional needs to its
population, suicide and serious suicidal
ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the
most basic human instinct: the will to live. A
society in which such a vast swath of the
population is seriously considering it as an
option is one which is anything but healthy, one
which is plainly failing to provide its citizens
the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.
The alarming CDC data extends far beyond
serious suicidal desires. It also found that
“40.9% of respondents reported at least one
adverse mental or behavioral health condition,
including symptoms of anxiety disorder or
depressive disorder (30.9%), symptoms of a
trauma- and stressor-related disorder (TSRD)
related to the pandemic (26.3%), and having
started or increased substance use to cope with
stress or emotions related to COVID-19 (13.3%).”
For the youngest part of the adult population,
ages 18-24, significantly more than half
(62.9 percent) reported suffering from
depressive or anxiety
s.
That mental health would suffer materially
in the middle of a pandemic — one that
requires isolation from community and work,
quarantines, economic shutdowns, and fear of
illness and death — is not surprising. In
April, as the realities of isolation and
quarantine were becoming more apparent in
the U.S., we devoted a SYSTEM UPDATE episode
to a discussion with the mental health
experts Andrew Solomon and Johann Hari,
both of whom described how “the traumas
of this pandemic — the unraveling of our way
of life for however long that lasts, the
compulsory viewing of all other humans as
threats, and especially sustained isolation
and social distancing” — will exacerbate
virtually every social pathology, including
ones of mental health.
But what makes
these trends all the more disturbing is that
they long predated the arrival of the
coronavirus crisis, to say nothing of the
economic catastrophe left in its wake and
the social unrest from this year’s protest
movement. Indeed, since at least the
financial crisis of 2008, when first the
Bush administration and then the Obama
administration acted to protect the
interests of the tycoons who caused it while
allowing everyone else to wallow in debt and
foreclosures, the indicia of collective
mental health in the U.S. have been blinking
red.
In 2018, NBC News, using health insurance
studies,
reported that “major depression is on
the rise among Americans from all age
groups, but is rising fastest among teens
and young adults.” In 2019, the American
Psychological Association
published a study documenting a 30
percent increase “in the rate of death by
suicide in the United States between 2000
and 2016, from 10.4 to 13.5 per 100,000
people” and a 50 percent increase “in
suicides among girls and women between 2000
and 2016.” It noted: “Suicide was
the 10th-leading cause of death in the
United States in 2016. It was the
second-leading cause of death among people
ages 10 to 34 and the fourth-leading cause
among people ages 35 to 54.”
In March 2020, the New Yorker’s Atul
Gawande
published a survey of data from two
Princeton economists, Anne Case and Angus
Deaton, under the headline: “Why
Americans Are Dying from Despair: the
unfairness of our economy, two economists
argue, can be measured not only in dollars
but in deaths.” The decadeslong economic
stagnation for Americans, the reversal of
the American Dream, and the shockingly high
mass unemployment ushered in by the pandemic
are obviously significant reasons why these
pathologies are rapidly worsening now.
Observing these trends is necessary but not
sufficient for understanding their breadth
and their impact. Why is virtually every
metric of mental and spiritual disease —
suicide, depression, anxiety disorders,
addiction, and alcoholism — increasing
significantly, rapidly, in the richest
country on earth, one filled with advanced
technologies and at least the pretense of
liberal democracy?
One answer was provided
by Dr. Laurel Williams, chief of psychiatry
at Texas Children’s Hospital, to NBC when
discussing the rise of depression: “There’s
a lack of community. There’s the amount of
time that we spend in front of screens and
not in front of other people. If you don’t
have a community to reach out to, then your
hopelessness doesn’t have any place to go.”
That answer is similar to the one offered
by the brilliant
book on depression and modern western
societies by Johann Hari, “Lost
Connections,” along with his viral
TED Talk on the same topic: namely, it
is precisely the attributes that define
modern Western societies that are crafted
perfectly to deprive humans of their most
pressing emotional needs (a book by Hari on
addiction, “Chasing the Scream,” and an even-more-viral
TED Talk about it, sounds a similar
theme about why Americans are turning in
horrifyingly large numbers to serious
problems of substance abuse).
Much attention is devoted to lamenting
the toxicity of our discourse, the
hate-driven polarization of our politics,
and the fragmentation of our culture. But it
is difficult to imagine any other outcome in
a society that is breeding so much
psychological and emotional pathology by
denying to its members the things they most
need to live fulfilling lives.
