Breathe! Don't Succumb to the Pathological Hysteria from the Coronavirus Madness

Gabriela Segura, M.D.
Sott.net

I practice Family Medicine in Europe and as everybody knows by now, we're in the midst of Coronavirus madness^TM which we are told is now an official global pandemic. It's true that we're living through a critical, decisive and increasingly divisive era, but the real issue is something other than what the media and politicians would have us believe.

Let's review our society's problems for some much needed perspective.

Very Dark Statistics, Indeed

Regardless of how many people on the planet are actively aware of it, the truth is that tens of millions of people drop like flies from illness, depression and self-destruction every single day. And that's a trend that has been ongoing for, well, a very long time.

According to the WHO assessment of deaths by cause for the years 2000-2016, close to 800,000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. And those who have been paying attention will know that, in the past few years, the generalized state of the public's mental health has not improved.

Data analyzing 55 million insured American millennials (aged 21 to 36) in 2017 found that since 2013, millennials have seen a 47% increase in major depression diagnoses (Hoffower, 2019).

In the UK, prescriptions for antidepressants have more than doubled in the last decade. In 2016, there were 64.7 million antidepressants dispensed - 33.7 million (108.5 per cent) more than in 2006, when there were 31.0 million (NHS Digital, 2019).

The U.S. saw a 64% increase in the percentage of people using antidepressants between 1999 and 2014 (Winerman, 2017). However, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that antidepressant use in the U.S. has increased nearly 400% in the last two decades, making antidepressants the most frequently used class of medications by Americans aged 18-44 (Segura, 2013). The U.S. population makes up 5% of the world population, yet is prescribed two-thirds of all psychiatric drugs used worldwide.

In Japan, suicide is the leading cause of death among children aged 10 to 14 for the first time in the postwar period (Kyodo, 2019). Suicide rates among American children have increased 77% over the past 10 years, with that number even higher during the school year (Vibes, 2018).

An average of 20 American veterans committed suicide daily in 2014 according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Since 2001, veteran suicides increased by 32%, while civilian suicides among adults increased 23% (RT, 2016).

Another report published in June 2019 revealed that suicide rates are officially at their highest level since World War II with 1.4 million attempting suicide in 2017 (Durden, 2019). More than 70,000 people committed suicide in 2017, and 17.3 million (7%) of Americans are experiencing mental health issues. US life expectancy has also declined for three straight years, in part because of the surge in drug overdoses and suicides. This is the first time in a little over a century that life expectancy fell for three consecutive years.

According to a report that analyzed the causes of preventable deaths in America in 2017, for the first time in history, Americans are more likely to die from an accidental opioid overdose than in a vehicle crash. If it's a consolation, the odds of dying from an opioid overdose are still one in 96 vs one in 6 from heart disease or one in 7 from cancer (Mazzei, 2019). In fact, 1 out of 2 men and 1 out of 3 women will get cancer in their lifetime.

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At The Frontiers Of Surveillance Capitalism

Katie Fitzpatrick
The Nation

Before they started their successful wildcat strike last year, West Virginia teachers railed against the introduction of a workplace wellness program called Go365. The program coerced employees into downloading an app that would monitor their health, rewarding points for exercise and good behavior. Employees who failed to accrue 3,000 points by the end of the year would be penalized with a $25 monthly fee and increased deductibles. 

Although the program was made voluntary before the strike began (and has since been eliminated), the outrage over Go365 helped ignite the strike. As one teacher told The New York Times, “People felt that was very invasive, to have to download that app and to be forced into turning over sensitive information.”

By resisting Go365, the West Virginia teachers waged two battles at once: They fought in the trenches of state austerity and on the front lines of private digital surveillance. The app presaged many of the worrying trends that Shoshana Zuboff describes in her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She explains that Silicon Valley firms are looking to wearable technologies and other smart devices to gain an increasingly detailed view of our physical and emotional health. Go365 measured teachers’ daily steps with the help of a Fitbit; Sleep Number beds measure the hours we keep and the quality of our rest; a new company called Realeyes plans to surveil our facial expressions as we watch advertisements, interpreting our emotions in real time. 

Silicon Valley firms don’t want to simply monitor our behavior, however; they plan to shape it, too. Their influence over our actions might be indirect for now, effected through the prizes and penalties that Go365 weaponized against teachers. But by integrating these devices into our daily lives, these companies also set the stage for a future of more direct intervention. Zuboff quotes one software developer fantasizing aloud about the tech industry’s ability to push and prod us remotely: “We can know if you shouldn’t be driving, and we can just shut your car down…we tell the TV to shut off and make you get some sleep, or the chair to start shaking because you shouldn’t be sitting so long.”
Drawing on thorough research as well as alarming interviews like that one, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers an urgent warning about our possible future. Zuboff discusses the technological innovations and market mechanisms that make ubiquitous surveillance increasingly likely. Although her diagnosis is chilling, her solutions are few. 

Throughout the book, she decries the abuses perpetrated by Silicon Valley companies and argues that they represent a radical break from an earlier, kinder form of capitalism. But by refusing to acknowledge the continuities between past modes of exploitation and the latest horrors of surveillance capitalism, she ultimately leads readers away from the most promising paths of resistance.

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Why Young Lives are Losing Meaning and Purpose (I)

M.K. Styllinksi
Infrakshun

The crisis of meaning and purpose is something many of us are grappling with today. Girls and boys and young adults in particular are not succeeding in this battle. The path which defines our lives up to middle and retirement age is for the majority, mostly a constellation of conditioned responses encouraged by Official Culture. It replaces true meaning with a role that serves the technosphere as opposed to our true calling. Not always, but all too frequently. Then we are back to that existential crisis of youth where something deep inside knows that to find true creative balance takes a life time of struggle against forces that oppose any kind of spiritual liberation. Unless that is, we have the support to explore the transformation that comes knocking at the door of consciousness at various stages of our lives. To even have the awareness to heed that call requires a very different society than we have now.

Life is extremely complicated for young people these days, whether they are in Western, Asian, African or Middle Eastern societies. The predisposition of tyranny from our hierarchical institutions and social systems means that such a danger will always be there, even when there is momentum toward autopoietic * social innovations. The imbalance inherent within state authority and the unceasing drive of so many to live outside it's influence is growing. This is a welcome, if as yet, ad hoc reaction against the finite and unsustainable nature of cartel capitalism and rampant state-sponsored crimes against humanity. We haven't yet found that crucial tension, that balance that provides a psychological inoculation against psychopathic infiltration which so often turns civilisations into crucibles of centralised control. Such intense focus on hierarchical power always fails and amid the rubble there are always young folks who act as literal and symbolic precursors to that descent, usually by embodying those ills and thereby showing us what long term or immediate future lies ahead. Each epoch manifests that see-saw between managed chaos and mass creativity which eventually bursts forth in destructive ways, sweeping away everything that went before.  Children and young adults are the tuning fork of future generations in this regard. Nonetheless, there is has been a very wide historical berth when it comes to defining how our youth interact with the world. The older generations have a distinct challenge to make sure our younger generations are correctly tuned to that which offers hope, spiritual strength and resilience to face what is certain to be an unpredictable and challenging future.

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After analysing the field’s leading journal, a psychologist asks: Is social psychology still the science of behaviour?

Alex Fradera
Research Digest
 
Part of my role at the Digest involves sifting through journals looking for research worth covering, and I’ve sensed that modern social psychology generates plenty of studies based on questionnaire data, but far fewer that investigate the kind of tangible behavioural outcomes illuminated by the field’s classics, from Asch’s conformity experiments to Milgram’s research on obedience to authority. A new paper in Social Psychological Bulletin examines this apparent change systematically. Based on his findings, Dariusz Doliński at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland asks the bleak question: is psychology still a science of behaviour?

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Charles Hugh Smith: We Desperately Need Shared Values, Connection, & Positive Social Roles

Adam Taggart
Peak Prosperity

We've recently published a series of commentary on PeakProsperity.com addressing the epidemic of disconnection, dissatisfaction and demoralization that society is increasingly suffering from today:

• Feeling Isolated?
  
• Facing The (Horrible) Future
  
• A New Framework For The Future
  
• The End of Growth
  

Together, these articles beg the question: In an age of more "prosperity" than the human species has ever experienced, why are so many of us feeling so empty?

And what solutions exist out there to offer us more meaning, connection and purpose in our lives?

Joining us this week is Charles Hugh Smith, who gives a detailed account of the root causes of what's ailing society, as well as the essential ingredients for repairing it.

Our culture is ill.
Our families have been depreciated and demoralized. A lot of people don't get along with their families. They don't have any family connections. Or they see their relatives once every few years or something. 
Of course this is understandable in an economy where we have where people are always moving around. You have to move for your job. Or you have to move for your kids' schools. There's a dozen reasons why you've got to move far away and then lose connection to your family of origin. Distance makes it much more difficult to maintain. But, however it occurs, this loss of sense of family is a core factor plaguing our culture. 
Then there's the erosion of values and faith. Those experiences are primary in their participants' lives. You have got to have faith or value. Something you really value and you're willing to sacrifice for. You find other people in the same boat. You're going to have something that's really exciting and positive. Everyone is going to get positive feedback when they join.
A strong belief in a value system will allow you to congregate around things. Like for artists it's about finding a cheap place to live and sharing your art with other people who are just as excited about doing their art. That's a value system. I will sacrifice everything else to support this. Shared values are the anchors or magnets for social engagement. 
And when people congregate around shared values, there are positive social roles for everyone. In other words, you could be unemployed. You could be at a low point in your family.  You could have a lot of things going wrong in your life. But when you show up for that organizational meeting, people brighten, "Hey, you're here! We need you. Your contribution is important."
It just makes an enormous difference in your outlook on life. Your demoralization goes away -- at least, as long as you're participating in community groups with positive social roles.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Charles Hugh Smith (53m:56s).

The Perilous State of the University: Jonathan Haidt & Jordan B Peterson

Comment: If you haven't managed to catch this conversation between Peterson and Haidt, this one's essential viewing. 

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