With Scott Morrison as the new prime minister, the Abbott-Turnbull era persistent attacks on the social fabric of the nation are bound to continue. Thus ensuring that Australians follow down the same path as Britain and America?
The
Guardian, 18
August 2018:
Britain
and America are in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis. They
are experiencing not merely a slowdown
in life expectancy, which in many other rich countries is continuing
to lengthen, but the start of an alarming increase in death rates across
all our populations, men and women alike. We are needlessly allowing our people
to die early.
In
Britain, life expectancy, which increased steadily for a century, slowed
dramatically between 2010 and 2016. The rate of increase dropped by 90% for
women and 76% for men, to 82.8 years and 79.1 years respectively. Now, death
rates among older people have so much increased over the last two years – with
expectations that this will continue – that two major insurance companies,
Aviva and Legal
and General, are releasing hundreds of millions of pounds they had been
holding as reserves to pay annuities to pay to shareholders instead. Society,
once again, affecting the citadels of high finance.
Trends
in the US are more serious and foretell what is likely to happen in Britain
without an urgent change in course. Death rates of people in
midlife (between 25 and 64) are increasing across the racial and ethnic
divide. It has long been known that the mortality rates of midlife American
black and Hispanic people have been worse than the non-Hispanic white
population, but last week the British Medical Journal
published an important study re-examining
the trends for all racial groups between 1999 and 2016.
The
malaises that have plagued the black population are extending to the
non-Hispanic, midlife white population. As the report states: “All cause
mortality increased… among non-Hispanic whites.” Why? “Drug overdoses were the
leading cause of increased mortality in midlife, but mortality also increased
for alcohol-related conditions, suicides and organ diseases involving multiple
body systems” (notably liver, heart diseases and cancers).
US
doctors coined a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”. Poor
working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and
neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs
available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job
security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning
a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support
and contingent access to healthcare.
Finding meaning in life is close to
impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional
resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very
different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are
valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food
and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing
relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological
side-effects,
that is the killer.
Shit-life
syndrome captures the truth that the bald medical statistics have economic and
social roots. Patients so depressed they are prescribed or seek opioids – or
resort to alcohol – are suffering not so much from their demons but from the
circumstances of their lives. They have a lot to be depressed about. They, and
tens of millions like them teetering on the edge of the same condition,
constitute Donald Trump’s electoral base, easily tempted by rhetoric that pins
the blame on dark foreigners, while castigating countries such as Finland or
Denmark, where the trends are so much better, as communist. In Britain, they
were heavily represented among the swing voters who delivered Brexit.
Read the full
article here.
NOTE: The last time the United States saw a prolonged life expectancy decrease due to natural causes was during the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1917-1919 when life expectancy fell by twelve years.
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