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Comment by obblekk | Hacker News Reader

There’s gotta be some reason for the mental health crisis, along with all the other crises out there.

It doesn’t make sense for every level of American to be meaningfully wealthier and higher income than 20 years ago and yet also be suffering (in multiple ways!) more as well. We even (mostly) fixed health insurance by massively redistributing income! The rest of the world seems to be tracking the same trends but 10 years behind.

It used to be that increasing people’s income improved all cause mortality. Have we crossed some threshold where that’s reversed?

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Wealthier, yes. But meaningfully wealthier?

Money buys power and the political economy is zero sum, so: concentration of wealth -> concentration of power -> most people lose power -> most people's lives get worse.

And wealth has become much more concentrated. Consider that in the US: * billionaires increased their wealth by ~$5T during the pandemic [1]

* the top 1% own ~30% of wealth and the top .1% own ~13% of wealth [2]

* unlimited election spending by corporations and labor unions has been legal since 2010 [3]

* in FY2018, the top ten Fortune 100 companies receiving the most federal funding achieved an ostensible ROI on lobbying of 100,000% [4]

The trend is only picking up speed.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-doub... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distributi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/05/14/how...

It doesn’t make sense for every level of American to be meaningfully wealthier and higher income than 20 years ago and yet also be suffering (in multiple ways!) more as well.

I would argue that we are not meanigfully wealthier in community, sense of purpose, love, and many other intangible things.

> It doesn’t make sense for every level of American to be meaningfully wealthier and higher income than 20 years ago and yet also be suffering…

Maybe optimizing for a high and perpetually growing GDP is not in fact conducive to the mental health of those who generate it. But in any case, I’m not sure that it’s true that every stratum of US citizen has experienced income growth relative to inflation. Thomas Piketty’s analysis of US national income data points to a decline on the bottom end - a group that experiences disproportionately higher rates of mortality and morbidity.

> It doesn’t make sense for every level of American to be meaningfully wealthier and higher income than 20 years ago and yet also be suffering

It doesn’t? What if everyone is working more hours to maintain that income? Or taking on more stressful jobs and bringing that anxiety home with them?

I could believe that there’s a direct correlation between income and positive mental health in the very low bands of earning (i.e. living in poverty is stressful) but anything higher than that I’m dubious it’s so direct.

Well, for one thing we are all fatter, and the prevalence of depression in obese people has been found to be much higher than in healthy weight people. We are also more sedentary.

For another, most of us spend a lot of time on social media, the usage of which, at least for some demographics, has been strongly linked to depression. Also, due to screen usage and even LED lights interfering with melatonin production, we are getting one hour less sleep on average. That is actually an unreported crisis if you look into the effects of losing even one hour of sleep a night consistently.

Then there is the deterioration of social structures and "third places" such as church, clubs, and other social gatherings, which are shown to reduce depression.

People who even have health insurance are still going into bankruptcy when a severe illness like stroke or cancer befalls them. The US medical system still puts people into poverty due to medical circumstances every day.

I think it comes down to less connectedness and community, fewer personnel connections, less religion/spirituality, less moral grounding, tech/media landscape that drives feelings of division/fear/inadequacy, generally less sense of purpose and belonging and self worth.

> It doesn’t make sense for every level of American to be meaningfully wealthier and higher income than 20 years ago and yet also be suffering (in multiple ways!) more as well.

In what sense is every level of American meaningfully wealthier? Only the top quintile has higher income than they did 50 years ago, middle and lower income people have all stayed stagnant in both income and wealth.

"every level of American to be meaningfully wealthier" - I don't get this statement. I know a few people who own homes / property and they could perhaps qualify for this statement - but that gets into the weeds of they don't have that money in hand - sure they could sell, but they can't rebuy in the same city. Yeah second mortgages and of course when they die the property could convert to cash.. but they don't get to live much wealthier in general..

Most people I know that do not own property are doing much worse today than they were 10 years ago, and 15 years ago - everything is more expensive, and they do not earn much more.. they would be better off going back 15 years with what they earned then and pricing for housing / food / cars being what it was.

I'm wondering in what parts of the country that this is inverse.

I don't know if mental health has necessarily changed for the worse, as much as we stopped locking people up in the attic (Victorian solution), or tossing them in the 'loony bin'.

Here's a novelty song from the 60's about those days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNI1KfGXBA

And here's a movie from a decade later, based on a famous book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXrcDonY-B8

We don't deal with people that way anymore, but of course the problem remains.

> There’s gotta be some reason for the mental health crisis, along with all the other crises out there.

Evolution adapted you and everyone else out there to live in a small band of 50-200 people who only had occasional contact with other bands of about the same size. You do not have the psychological machinery to deal with more than that. Because humans are intelligent, and can learn to compartmentalize, we've scaled to a global civilization of 8 billion, most of whom live in constant daily contact with thousands of others, including direct contact with strangers.

This causes psychological malfunction, especially in those experiencing other sources of stress. Non-genetic hereditary factors contribute greatly. Cycles of abuse, dysfunction, and so on.

The world population has doubled even since I first learned what it was in grade school. And, soon enough, it will crash in the other direction, further confusing and causing strife.

Humans don't scale.

I think it has a lot to do with the birth rate. Here's a study from the prior century on the topic - there are a lot of correlated "people doing well" metrics, but when they controlled for fertility only it had the strongest negative correlation with suicide. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1737819/

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