101–110 of 278 posts
Drug overdose and abuse seem to me to be a symptom of something way more troubling. I can't help but feel like there is a sense of uselessness felt by and toward a large population in the US and rather than lift them up we are letting them be snuffed out.
The opioid epidemic is an amazing example of human psychology and the power of a visual. More people die from it every year than Vietnam, yet there's been no large public outcry to resolve the situation because it isn't right in your face like a 9/11 or pearl harbor. Even ignoring the human impact and just going to economics, those lost lives will cost the US billions in lost productivity over time, yet nobody really…
More people die from it every year than Vietnam [Kind of off-topic] I'm guessing you mean by 'than Vietnam', 'than Americans died in the Vietnam war"? (Well I think so. Apologies if not.) That's a pretty macabre unit. Can you imagine how a Vietnamese person would feel reading that? Maybe in Vietnam they say 'More people die from [something] every year than America' - meaning what they call the American War[0]. Wouldn…
The decline is mostly the product of an increase in drug overdose deaths and suicides (likely also related to drug abuse[1]). Cancer mortality is continuing to decline which is nice to hear: "Earlier this century, the steady and robust decline in heart-disease deaths more than offset the rising number from drugs and suicide, Dr. Anderson said. Now, “those declines aren’t there anymore,” he said, and the drug and suic…
> The decline is mostly the product of an increase in drug overdose and suicides The US is pretty much also the only country where suicides are increasing.
When it comes to spending on social welfare, the U.S. is at the low end of the spectrum relative to Western Europe. For example, only 18.8 percent of the U.S. GDP is spent on social welfare, while most of the OECD nations spend at least 25 percent of their GDP. Our rates of suicide are increasing while their rates fall.
of course it's way more complicated and nuanced than my one example.
edit - no? is this wrong?
Life expectancy for Americans fell again last year, despite growing recognition of the problems driving the decline and federal and local funds invested in stemming them.
Data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Thursday show life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years, pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicides in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from powerful opioid drugs like fentanyl. Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year’s increase.
Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation’s prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care.
“The continuation of this trend is a warning for all of us that our country has not found a way of addressing the profound needs of the people who are dying,” said Eric Caine, professor of psychiatry and director of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “While the economy may be recovering at the macro level, it’s very uncertain whether it’s affecting the lives of these people.”
The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation, and lags far behind other wealthy nations.
Life expectancy is 84.1 years in Japan and 83.7 years in Switzerland, first and second in the most-recent ranking by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. ranks 29th.
“It’s significant,” Bob Anderson, chief of the mortality-statistics branch of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said in an interview. “It doesn’t seem like a lot, but in terms of human cost you’ve got a lot of life that’s not being lived.”
White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation’s most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men.
“These sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” said CDC Director Robert Redfield.
As drug and suicide mortality has risen, deaths from heart disease, the nation’s leading killer, went down only slightly, failing to offset the increases in mortality from other causes and prolonging another worrisome trend. A decadeslong decline in deaths from heart disease—brought about by antismoking and other public-health campaigns, along with medications to control blood pressure and cholesterol—has stalled in recent years, with heart-disease deaths even increasing slightly in 2015.
Earlier this century, the steady and robust decline in heart-disease deaths more than offset the rising number from drugs and suicide, Dr. Anderson said. Now, “those declines aren’t there anymore,” he said, and the drug and suicide deaths account for many years of life lost because they occur mostly in young to middle-aged adults.
While progress against deaths from heart disease has stalled, cancer deaths—the nation’s No. 2 killer—are continuing a steady decline that began in the 1990s, Dr. Anderson said. “That’s kind of our saving grace,” he said. “Without those declines, we’d see a much bigger drop in life expectancy.”
Drug-overdose deaths skyrocketed between 2015 and 2017, particularly for adults between ages 25 and 54. The main culprit was fentanyl and other synthetic opioids that became pervasive in illicit drug supplies in the U.S. around that time.
Deaths from synthetic opioids rose 45% in 2017, while the death rate from heroin, which had risen sharply after 2010, was flat.
Methamphetamine and cocaine use is on the rise in the U.S., but deaths from those drugs weren’t broken out from the total. Those statistics will be released in mid-December, in a separate report, said Holly Hedegaard, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC and lead author of the reports released Thursday on drug overdoses and suicide.
There is some hope the decline in life expectancy won’t be prolonged. The rise in drug-overdose deaths was slower in 2017 than the previous year. Total overdose deaths for the preceding 12 months dropped slightly between late last year and April, though they remain high.
“We may have reached a peak in regards to the drug-overdose epidemic,” Dr. Anderson said. “I’m hopeful, given what we’ve seen in recent months.“ But, he cautioned, “This might just be a lull.”
More federal and local resources have been devoted to the opioid crisis. States began accessing nearly $1 billion in federal grants in 2017 to combat the opioid crisis. In addition, opioid prescriptions are monitored more tightly, and medication to reverse opioid overdoses has become more available, among other factors possibly behind the tentative improvement.
Suicides rose 3.7% in 2017, accelerating an increase in rates since 1999, the CDC said. The gap in deaths by suicide widened starkly between cities and the most rural areas between 1999 and 2017, the data show. The rate is now far higher in rural areas. “There’s a much wider spread,” Dr. Hedegaard said.
“This is extremely discouraging,” Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said of the suicide-rate increase. Studies show that traumas such as economic difficulties or natural disasters, along with access to lethal means including guns and opioid drugs, and lack of access to care can affect suicide rates, she said. More accurate recording of deaths may also have added to the numbers, she said.
Scientific understanding of suicide and its risk factors is improving, Dr. Moutier said, and new prevention programs are being implemented. But their effects have yet to be felt, because they haven’t been scaled up yet, she said.
“The science is growing tremendously,” she said. “We now have answers about how to prevent suicide.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"In the very near future when climate change has destroyed out planet" Maybe people are killing themselves because they are addicted to the fear porn spread by mainstream/social media regarding "climate change". I don't mean this as a joke, I was addicted to financial/economic fear porn for a bit and it did have a negative effect on my outlook.
Climate change is on track to cause catastrophic damage in the next few decades AND there is no indication of anything being seriously done about this. In other words, a train is barrelling and, crucially, there are no signs of anyone intending to stop it. Yeah, I think it's justified to be scared.
You can go through my recent post history to find it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The decline is mostly the product of an increase in drug overdose and suicides The US is pretty much also the only country where suicides are increasing.
Suicide rates in several other developed nations are either higher or compable to the US. Things must be really, really bad in Belgium, Finland and Iceland eh (you know, just three of the nicest countries on Earth). How could Sweden, France and Australia be anywhere near the US rate? Suicide rates in order per 100k: South Korea 20.2, Belgium 15.7, Japan 14.3, Finland 13.8, US 13.3, Iceland 13.3, France 12.1, Sweden 1…
The elephant(s) in the room is(are) of course Russia and within the EU - Poland(population: 38mln) - but in these cases the explanation as to why it happens is pretty obvious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The decline is mostly the product of an increase in drug overdose and suicides The US is pretty much also the only country where suicides are increasing.
Suicide rates in several other developed nations are either higher or compable to the US. Things must be really, really bad in Belgium, Finland and Iceland eh (you know, just three of the nicest countries on Earth). How could Sweden, France and Australia be anywhere near the US rate? Suicide rates in order per 100k: South Korea 20.2, Belgium 15.7, Japan 14.3, Finland 13.8, US 13.3, Iceland 13.3, France 12.1, Sweden 1…
All the other European ones you mention other than Finland (where the suicide rate is believed to be linked to being dark for half the year) are Eastern european former communist states. There's still a lag in healthcare modernisation there.
The opioid epidemic is an amazing example of human psychology and the power of a visual. More people die from it every year than Vietnam, yet there's been no large public outcry to resolve the situation because it isn't right in your face like a 9/11 or pearl harbor. Even ignoring the human impact and just going to economics, those lost lives will cost the US billions in lost productivity over time, yet nobody really…
It's so strange how prevalent it has become in the past few years to talk of human beings in terms of productivity. Growing up in the 90s, all the talk was about how we were mindless consumers. Now, all I hear is people talking of others and themselves as producers and productivity. How they feel about themselves and their worth depends on whether they had a 'productive day'. What does that really even mean? It's amazing how quickly the vernacular changes.
Never in a million years would I have ever thought of someone dying and juxtaposing that with productivity. Why even bring it up? Are we here just to produce for society or the wealthy or the government? 20 years ago, would we have been upset at all the consumers or consumption being lost through suicide and death? We are talking of others and ourselves like farmers talk about produce and livestock. Maybe that's what modern society has reduced us to. Livestock that needs to produce.
I can think of a few other causes like sickness being a potentially bankrupting event so people don't go to a doctor when they should or too late. This apparently is a risk, even if you have insurance because you are at the mercy of insurers not tossing you out over such whimsical reasons as pre-existing conditions or other bureaucratic tricks they use to kill their customers rather than getting them cured. There are…
Ah, yes. In the US, Twizzlers are a "Low fat snack": https://www.hersheys.com/twizzlers/en_us/products/twizzlers-...
In Canada, just candy: https://www.hersheys.com/twizzlers/en_ca/products/twizzlers-...