The New Malaise
In a recent report “young people in developing nations are at least twice as likely to feel happy about their lives than their richer counterparts.” The survey of over 5,400 young people in 14 countries aged 16 to 34 years showed that 43 percent of the youth were unhappy with their lot. The main source of sadness came from the US and the UK. 1 With the US having already lost billions of dollars in revenue due to rude immigration officials and visa delays it suggests that this is merely the tip of a psychological crisis. 2
According to a major US report on mental health in 2000, one in five Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder each year and half the entire population have such disorders at some time in their lives. Mental illness, including suicide, is the number two cause of disability. 3 The report goes on to list a plethora of mental disorders with a fifth of all children showing signs and symptoms of diagnosable mental disorders in any given year; 5 percent suffering “extreme functional impairment” 15 percent of adults aged between 18 to 54 suffering from anxiety disorders; 7 percent battling mood disorders and just over 1 percent diagnosed with schizophrenia. Senior citizenship usually represents the onset of depression occurring mostly in the over 65’s. It is also the age group with the highest rate of suicide.
As Writer Jim Windolf posed a somewhat more abrasive question on this subject in an October 1997 issue of The New York Observer:
If you add up all the psychological ailments Americans complain of, the portrait that emerges is of a nation of basket-cases. Ten million suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. Fourteen million are alcoholics. Fifteen million are pathologically socially anxious. Fifteen million are depressed. Three million suffer panic attacks. Ten million have Borderline Personality Disorder. Twelve million have ‘restless legs.’ Five million are obsessive/compulsive. Two million are manic-depressive. Ten million are addicted to sex. “But give the experts a little time,” he quipped, “With another new quantifiable disorder or two, everybody in the country will be officially nuts.”
Michael Parenti illustrates the full magnitude of the American pathological “infection” where on average:
*27,000 Americans commit suicide
* 5,000 attempt suicide; some estimates are higher
* 26,000 die from fatal accidents in the home.
*23,000 are murdered.
*85,000 are wounded by firearms.
*38,000 of these die, including 2,600 children.
*13,000,000 are victims of crimes including assault, rape, armed robbery, burglary, larceny, and arson.
*135,000 children take guns to school.
*5,500,000 people are arrested for all offenses (not including traffic violations).
*125,000 die prematurely of alcohol abuse.
*473,000 die prematurely from tobacco-related illnesses; 53,000 of these are nonsmokers.
*6,500,000 use heroin, crack, speed, PCP, cocaine or some other hard drug on a regular basis.
*5,000+ die from illicit drug use. Thousands suffer serious debilitations.
*1,000+ die from sniffing household substances found under the kitchen sink. About 20 percent of all eighth-graders have "huffed" toxic substances. Thousands suffer permanent neurological damage.
*31,450,000 use marijuana; 3,000,000 of whom are heavy usuers.
*37,000,000, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs. The users are mostly women. The pushers are doctors; the suppliers are pharmaceutical companies; the profits are stupendous.
*2,000,000 non-hospitalized persons are given powerful mind-control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets."
*5,000 die from psychoactive drug treatments.
*200,000 are subjected to electric shock treatments that are injurious to the brain and nervous system.
*600 to 1,000 are lobotomized, mostly women.
*25,000,000, or one out of every 10 Americans, seek help from psychiatric, psychotherapeutic, or medical sources for mental and emotional problems, at a cost of over $4 billion annually.
*6,800,000 turn to nonmedical services, such as ministers, welfare agencies, and social counselors for help with emotional troubles. In all, some 80,000,000 have sought some kind of psychological counseling in their lifetimes.
*1,300,000 suffer some kind of injury related to treatment at hospitals.
*2,000,000 undergo unnecessary surgical operations; 10,000 of whom die from the surgery.
*180,000 die from adverse reactions to all medical treatments, more than are killed by airline and automobile accidents combined.
*14,000+ die from overdoses of legal prescription drugs.
*45,000 are killed in auto accidents. Yet more cars and highways are being built while funding for safer forms of mass transportation is reduced.
*1,800,000 sustain nonfatal injuries from auto accidents; but 150,000 of these auto injury victims suffer permanent impairments.
*126,000 children are born with a major birth defect, mostly due to insufficient prenatal care, nutritional deficiency, environmental toxicity, or maternal drug addiction.
*2,900,000 children are reportedly subjected to serious neglect or abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation.
*5,000 children are killed by parents or grandparents.
*30,000 or more children are left permanently physically disabled from abuse and neglect. Child abuse in the United States afflicts more children each year than leukemia, automobile accidents, and infectious diseases combined. With growing unemployment, incidents of abuse by jobless parents is increasing dramatically.
*1,000,000 children run away from home, mostly because of abusive treatment, including sexual abuse, from parents and other adults. Of the many sexually abused children among runaways, 83 percent come from white families.
*150,000 children are reported missing.
*50,000 of these simply vanish. Their ages range from one year to mid-teens. According to the New York Times, ‘Some of these are dead, perhaps half of the John and Jane Does annually buried in this country are unidentified kids.’
*900,000 children, some as young as seven years old, are engaged in child labor in the United States, serving as underpaid farm hands, dishwashers, laundry workers, and domestics for as long as ten hours a day in violation of child labor laws.
*2,000,000 to 4,000,00 women are battered. Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to U.S. women.
*700,000 women are raped, one every 45 seconds.
*5,000,000 workers are injured on the job; 150,000 of whom suffer permanent work-related disabilities, including maiming, paralysis, impaired vision, damaged hearing, and sterility.
*100,000 become seriously ill from work-related diseases, including black lung, brown lung, cancer, and tuberculosis.
*14,000 are killed on the job; about 90 percent are men.
*100,000 die prematurely from work-related diseases.
*60,000 are killed by toxic environmental pollutants or contaminants in food, water, or air.
*4,000 die from eating contaminated meat.
*20,000 others suffer from poisoning by E.coli 0157-H7, the mutant bacteria found in contaminated meat that generally leads to lifelong physical and mental health problems. A more thorough meat inspection with new technologies could eliminate most instances of contamination--so would vegetarianism.
At present:
* 5,100,000 are behind bars or on probation or parole; 2,700,000 of these are either locked up in county, state or federal prisons or under legal supervision. Each week 1,600 more people go to jail than leave. The prison population has skyrocketed over 200 percent since 1980. Over 40 percent of inmates are jailed on nonviolent drug related crimes. African Americans constitute 13 percent of drug users but 35 percent of drug arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences. For nondrug offenses, African Americans get prison terms that average about 10 percent longer than Caucasians for similar crimes.
*15,000+ have tuberculosis, with the numbers growing rapidly; 10,000,000 or more carry the tuberculosis bacilli, with large numbers among the economically deprived or addicted.
*10,000,000 people have serious drinking problems; alcoholism is on the rise.
*16,000,000 have diabetes, up from 11,000,000 in 1983 as Americans get more sedentary and sugar addicted. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure and nerve damage.
*160,000 will die from diabetes this year.
*280,000 are institutionalized for mental illness or mental retardation. Many of these are forced into taking heavy doses of mind control drugs.
*255,000 mentally ill or retarded have been summarily released in recent years. Many of the “deinstitutionalized” are now in flophouses or wandering the streets.
*3,000,000 or more suffer cerebral and physical handicaps including paralysis, deafness, blindness, and lesser disabilities. A disproportionate number of them are poor. Many of these disabilities could have been corrected with early treatment or prevented with better living conditions.
*2,400,000 million suffer from some variety of seriously incapacitating chronic fatigue syndrome.
*10,000,000+ suffer from symptomatic asthma, an increase of 145 percent from 1990 to 1995, largely due to the increasingly polluted quality of the air we breathe.
*40,000,000 or more are without health insurance or protection from catastrophic illness.
*1,800,000 elderly who live with their families are subjected to serious abuse such as forced confinement, underfeeding, and beatings. The mistreatment of elderly people by their children and other close relatives grows dramatically as economic conditions worsen.
*1,126,000 of the elderly live in nursing homes. A large but undetermined number endure conditions of extreme neglect, filth, and abuse in homes that are run with an eye to extracting the highest possible profit.
*1,000,000 or more children are kept in orphanages, reformatories, and adult prisons. Most have been arrested for minor transgressions or have committed no crime at all and are jailed without due process. Most are from impoverished backgrounds. Many are subjected to beatings, sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, mind control drugs, and in some cases psychosurgery.
*1,000,000 are estimated to have AIDS as of 1996; over 250,000 have died of that disease. 4
You get the idea.
Meanwhile, long-term reliance on technology has displaced vast numbers of blue-collar workers who have no skills to find other work taken on by robotic efficiency and software streamlining. There are great numbers of honest, descent people who have become the technologically dispossessed whose jobs have been lost through labour-saving technologies and re-structured work places. This has produced significant mental health problems in the unemployed. A spate of studies in the 1980s and 90s found distinct correlations between the rise in technological unemployment and “increased levels of depression and psychotic morbidity.”5
One clinical psychologist whose patients include the “hard core” unemployed for up to and over fifteen years found “symptoms of pathology similar to dying patients.” As social commentator Jeremy Rifkin bluntly states: “The death of the Global labor force is being internalized by millions of workers who experience their own individual deaths, daily, at the hands of profit driven employers and a disinterested government.” 6
The answer to one in ten children in Europe suffering from depression is not to give them more Prozac or to lock them up if they don’t fit into a particular diagnostic category. It may boost the exorbitant profits of pharmaceutical companies and that of their shareholders but it will only increase the mental health problems for youngsters. The European Medical Agency knows full well that this is a failure to find creative solutions. They know that such a product and many like it are part of a class of drugs known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). There is copious evidence suggesting that some SSRIs are associated with an increased risk of suicidal behaviour and thoughts. The profit margins demand that such inconvenient data disappear down the throats of new generation of children as young as eight years old. 7
We may have reached that point where we have an almost bulimic relationship to our everyday world. We are experts at receiving pre-programmed commands linked to our innate drives to belong and to feel secure. If we do not receive those signals and the requisite “hit” - we fall apart. Living in mud huts, running around naked and hugging trees is not necessarily the answer here, but when we disconnect ourselves from real life, including our ecological heritage, and choose to plug ourselves and our children into a synthetic, virtual world atop a spiritual and moral vacuum then it should come as no surprise that we become less able to cope with real life and therefore easy prey for those who can and know how to use this against us.
The objective, “nuts & bolts,” nitty-gritty reality has a direct correspondence to the original unsullied and spoiled self lying deeply within, covered in the layers and grime of generations of programming and conditioned beliefs. How can we find our way back to something authentic if we cannot even see past the techtopia of the unreal that has made its home in our very neurology? It’s time to pull the plug while we still can.
Notes
1 ‘Young people in developed countries unhappy-survey’ Reuters, Nov 19, 2006.
2 ‘U.S. is most unfriendly country to visitors, survey says’ Reuters, Nov 20, 2006.
3 Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, Dec. 16, 1999.
4 From Dirty Truths, Chapter: Hidden Holocaust USA; Some Grim Statistics by Michael Parenti, published by City Lights Books (1996).
5 Quoted from Chapter 12, P. 195; The End of Work, - Technology, Jobs and your Future, The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era by Jeremy Rifkin, published by Tarcher/Putnambooks (1995)ISBBN 0-87477-824-7.
6 Chapter 12, p.197 (Rifkin, 1995)
7 Eight-year-olds 'can use Prozac' BBC News, June 7, 2006.
