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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Why are mental issues so prevalent in USA?

Temptative hypothesis 1: People have less roots than in Europe, so they don’t belong somewhere, and have weak ties with close family and no ties with extended family, so they move, and when they fall off their life, there is no social safety net?

Temptative hypothesis 2: Americans classify any bad mood as a mental issue?

Temptative 3: Medical aid is too expensive when you’re, by definition, fallen off at the feet of the social ladder?

Temptative 4: Capitalism separates people? Financial success separates people?

Temptative 5: CIA needed off-network money to fund ISIS, so they traded drugs in Columbia, sold to poor schmocks in Texas, and got the money to pay ISIS? (everyone is a victim here)

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I think part of it is how isolated the us is. We don't really have walkable neighborhoods in most of the country, which means less spur of the moment decisions to gather at a social place and more isolation since so many people are commuting in single occupancy vehicles and doing drive throughs.

Combine that with wealth stratification, Hussle culture, and the complete lack of any real social safety net and if anything I'm surprised we're doing as well as we are.

I don't think it's a single issue by far, but if I had to peg one aspect as the worst offender, it's isolationism. There's strong correlation between drug use, depression, suicide, and lower life expectancy in places with power population density (Alaska, Noth Dakota, pretty much any small rustbelt or mountain or southern town)

When there's nothing to fill the emptiness, people turn to drugs and overeating just to feel something.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2022472118

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States...

Isolation is a big one. The classic study people bring up is the “cocaine rat”.

The rat in isolation was drawn to the bottle with cocaine water. When the rat was in a cage with activites and other rats, lost the preference for the cocaine water.

Do you have a citation? A search for "cocaine rat study" mostly turned up references to the Rat Park experiment, which used morphine. A later study comparing heroin and cocaine found that social isolation increased overall usage of heroin (apparently because the isolated rats picked up the habit faster) but not cocaine, and that by the fifth week of the study usage rates were similar between isolated and non-isolated groups for both drugs [1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2616610/

I would hope that "cocaine rat" is a major motion picture soon to be coming to theaters near you.

Give humans in a room together a vat of cocaine water and that vat will be quickly drained lol

Doing drugs in isolation is a coping mechanism, doing drugs with others is social bonding

So what if you remove the vat of cocaine water by just removing the vat instead of by permanently crippling the other "rats" with 40,000 life-long collateral penalties after a jail where they could easily have been killed inside of?

There has to be a basis for social unity. Family ties are the natural basis. Ethnic ties (which are defined more so by culture, though extended family ties still play a role) and religious belonging, all form this basis, this matrix. The US and countries like it are adoptive nations, oddballs in that they are not really rooted in ethnicity. Ethnic identity evaporates after a couple of generations, during which assimilation and intermarriage dilute the culture of origin. According to the triple melting pot theory, religious belonging becomes a stand-in for ethnic identity in "artificial" nations like the US (it was originally called "triple" because the three largest religious groups at the time in the US were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, but this is incidental to the basic claim). With the atrophy of traditional religious affiliation in the US, you're seeing an identity crisis and the rise of various ideologies and subcultures as attempts to find a substitute.

Mental illness is a huge risk factor for becoming homeless, which in turn will escalate any mental health issue to a massive degree. Better access to treatment and better safeguards against homelessness for the affected do actually help a lot. OTOH, migration of the affected towards areas with comparatively good services can create perverse incentives for other areas to just dump their homeless and mentally ill. And then feel smug about solving the problem for themselves.

Lmao one of these things is not like the others.

#6 they're prevelant everywhere including Europe, and care for them is terrible everywhere, including Europe.

"Mental illness" is also a problem in France.

I recommend you check out reddit r/LateStageCapitalism .

There is so much to be said about how fuck up our world is, I don't wanna start or i'll write a brick.

Elon Musk said recently that school is a joke, and that he do home schooling. Well, he is not the first one to have said it, but he is damn right. Idriss Aberkane has some very good conferences on the subject.

In USA, compared to France, you can add the issue of student debt (slavery). And the city layout being made for cars, public transportation or bikes are scarce, meaning young ones have to heavely rely on parents to do any activitie.

Oh... and your president is not just bad and malevolent, like in France, he is also senile. But like in France, a lot of citizen have voted for him.

Finnaly, who is really sick here ?

"It is not a sign of good mental health to be well adapted to a sick society."

lol you can’t expect to be taken seriously if you are recommending that subreddit.

Meth induced psychosis. Meth is given to many people as children here.

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