@blatham,
blatham wrote:I don't think I'm with you on this. I don't see any good reason to presume that there is some change in culture caused by an increase in mental health issues. If that were the case, it would show up across society and would surely have caught the attention of mental health professionals and those responsible for monitoring health issues in the country.
The opioid crisis (and it is a crisis) is understood to be a consequence of increases in use/abuse of prescription pain relievers, heroin and particularly the arrival of fentanyl into the drug scene. If we lowered the legal drinking age to 14, there would be more alcoholism and more deaths but mental illness wouldn't be the cause.
I'm not sure this is just a matter of availability.. There seems to be something simultaneously more specific and broader going on. The opioid crisis is hitting specific demographics especially virulently. Not just in terms of obvious geographies (eg Appalachians); it's middle-aged white men without college education who are dying off in particular high numbers. And that's not isolated. The same goes for rising suicide numbers. And for alcoholism -- down overall, but apparently up for specific demographics.
Just like the crack crisis likely didn't solely appear because of developments in the drug market but also because of specific broader social problems that were especially bad in poor, urban, black neighbourhoods, this crisis also seems reflective of a broader problem; and when suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction come together, mental health would seem a common strand:
Quote:The Forces Driving Middle-Aged White People's 'Deaths Of Despair'
In 2015, when researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton discovered that death rates had been rising dramatically since 1999 among middle-aged white Americans, they weren't sure why people were dying younger, reversing decades of longer life expectancy. Now the husband-and-wife economists say they have a better understanding of what's causing these "deaths of despair" by suicide, drugs and alcohol. [...]
Angus Deaton: Mortality rates have been going down forever. There's been a huge increase in life expectancy and reduction in mortality over 100 years or more, and then for all of this to suddenly go into reverse [for whites ages 45 to 54], we thought it must be wrong. We spent weeks checking out numbers because we just couldn't believe that this could have happened [...].
We knew the proximate causes — we know what they were dying from. We knew suicides were going up rapidly, and that overdoses mostly from prescription drugs were going up, and that alcoholic liver disease was going up. The deeper questions were why those were happening — there's obviously some underlying malaise