Insecure People are a template for disaster

Decline of the west, Health

As Astra Taylor says in her 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, this is the age of insecurity.

Charles E. Moore a physician and the Chief of Service Otolaryngology at the Grady Health System points out that for African Americans who have always had a lower life expectancy than comparable whites, it is significant that they have always had chronic stress. The life expectancies of African-Americans have been rising slightly while that of white working-class people has been declining.  He suggests that this might be because whites experiencing stress is something new.

Yet African-American life expectancies are still 3 &1/2 years less than whites. But the gap is closing. Dr. Moore also operates a clinic in Atlanta.  He says you can expect a 12-year difference in life expectancy between the African-Americans he largely treats and the whites that live north of Atlanta. All you have to do is look at their zip codes and you know the story. It is that simple.

Many of his patients have to choose between medication and food, or medication and gas. Those are some tough choices they have to make. That generates a lot of stress.

People who have been laid off from their jobs often blame greed. Often, they believe compassion is lost from society. It is all just about money. The pain they feel can easily turn to despair. Many of the people thought they had job security and then they got laid off. Many times they had committed to buying houses they thought they could afford because they had job security. Then they found out the hard way that they had no security. Those people have suffered. It is even worse when they continually hear that the economy is improving. Laid off people don’t see that. Insecure people don’t see that. Many people don’t see that.

Many of such people find the stress intolerable and turn to suicide. As Dr. Gupta said, “In the United States more people die by suicide with a hand gun than die by homicide with a hand gun. It’s gone up 30% in the last 17 years.”

Dr. Gupta believes that the problem is ultimately expectations. Many people in the United States and Canada for that matter believe that if you just work hard enough everything will work out fine. “Those dashed expectations end up being a unique and toxic feature here. The headline is that stress kills.”

As Dr. Rajita Sinha, a Clinical Neuroscientist and Director of the Yale Stress Center said, “Stress is everywhere. We are drinking more. We were smoking more before we had social interventions; we have a massive obesity epidemic, and we have economic and economic stress. So we have the stage for uncontrollable chronic stress.” That is a template for disaster.

It is also a template for a declining society. That is really the point I am trying to make.

The Meaning of Life under Stress

Decline of the west, Health

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told Dr. Sanjaya Gupta. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and Anne Case coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

In the end of the second decade of the 21st century everyone seems to think the economy is improving, but all these working class people see are plants closing and jobs disappearing. The economy may be booming but they don’t see that for themselves. Everyone else seems to be doing well. The economy may be booming now but so many people are still left behind. These people feel deep resentment. These people feel betrayed. They don’t think America is great. They want it to be great again like it was. And resentment is a powerful and explosive force!

What do you do when the plant you have worked at for decades shuts down? It is tough. It is also tough on those who work in other plants. They can see that this might happen to them too.  That makes people feel uneasy. They are insecure and stressed. And this has happened over and over again in many sectors. Economic insecurity has become rampant.

The key is the lack of control that leads to stress. How much does your job or your status affect your health? There was a famous study out of England called the Whitehall Study that was one of the first that tried to dig into this issue.

Sir Michael Marmot an epidemiologist from University College in England was involved in that study. He said when his study started everybody “knew” that stress caused heart disease. And everybody “knew” that high status people had more stress. It was obvious to everyone. I knew as a lawyer in what I always thought was a high stress profession that I had much more stress than most other people. Then one day I read a report in a newspaper about stress. It might have been a report about the Whitehall Study in fact. It said legal secretaries had more stress than lawyers. How could that be? Yet the study revealed that among civil servants at least the lower your status the shorter your life expectancy. Lack of control at work increases heart disease, mental illness and muscularly skeletal disorders. That is what chronic stress is all about.

As Professor Marmot said, “So close the link between social circumstances and mental health gives us a measure of how well we are doing as a society.”

Insecurity leads to stress which leads to poor health. This is a dangerous path that so many of us are walking and it can transform our lives sometimes in very unpleasant ways.

Anne Case and Angus Deacon: Deaths of Despair

Decline of the west, Drugs, Health, Substance Abuse

Dr. Sanjay Gupta for his HBO special and Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn for the New York Times, all interviewed Anne Case and her husband Angus Deacon. Both of them are economists from Princeton University but we won’t hold that against them. As she said, “Whites are reporting poorer and poorer health, more and more pain, and more and more social isolation. More depression. Along with this increase in mortality from drugs, alcohol, suicide there is just a lot more morbidity, pain, and social isolation.” Anne Case came up with the expression “deaths of despair” and it has become very popular.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, conducted an important study of mortality and wrote the book, Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century. Dr. Gupta interviewed them for the television show. In that book they described “deaths of despair” as “death by drugs, alcohol and suicide.” According to them, so many people have died from deaths of despair to equal all the people who have died of AIDs since the beginning of the AIDs crisis. Those deaths were enough to cause life expectancy to fall first for whites and then for the entire population. That is a very unusual event.

These people were the children of the people that won the world war and were expected to live glorious lives in the land of the free and the brave. The parents expected their children to do even better than they did. Those expectations were often not met. As Deaton put it, “They were promised the earth but they did not inherit it.” Case said, “in every state but 2, cirrhosis of the liver and alcoholic liver disease went up. And in every state drug poisoning went up. In every state between 1999 and 2015 suicide rates went up for people aged 22 to 64. If you treat people in a really shabby way for long enough bad things happen to them. That happened to African Americans forever and it started to happen to whites with a High School degree or less, starting probably in the mid-seventies. And now bad things are happening to both of those groups.

Dr. Gupta that if we wanted to know the effects of economic decline all we had to do was visit the American Rust Belt.  There they produced more steel than the rest of the world put together. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week smog from those plants went into the atmosphere of American cities.

Swissvale Pennsylvania , according to Eric Horgos, is the valley that is  “the epicenter of the greatest industrial collapse in the entire developed world in the 1980s. 1983 is when economic Armageddon hit them.”

Is it surprising that people who lived a certain way that they liked for 30 years and then had the rug pulled out from under them wanted to commit suicide? Is it any wonder they turned to alcohol or drugs? Is it any wonder that they despaired? Is it any wonder that they gave up on politicians that that they had once respected, and then turned instead to a demagogue?

Constant Change

Decline of the west, Drugs, Health, Substance Abuse

 

Americans, like Canadians, are living in a world that is changing faster than ever before. And that is change is constant. As a friend of mine always says, ‘Change is the only constant”.  And such constant change can be stressful.

There are all kinds of health problems out there. I know some of them too personally for my taste. People are obese.  It is astonishing how obese people are in the richest nation on earth. In Arizona where I spend a lot of time in recent years, we see it all the time. People have heart conditions. They have cancers. Yet, there is something harder to define. What Dr. Sanjay Gupta called the “real state of stress” in his HBO special.

And everyone wants a pill to solve their health problems. People want quick solutions to their problems. So do I of course. Americans take more drugs than the people of any other country on earth. And Canada is not far behind. Those drugs served a really useful purpose. They can save lives. They can ease pain. Yet, as Dr. Gupta pointed out, in the US  “50 people die every day from prescription pain killers!”

Shown on Dr. Gupta’s special, Angela Glass was a mother in Victoria Texas. She knew that stress can be ugly. It can cause issues in every area of your life. Wherever you already have problems, stress can make them worse. Stress compounds the problem. Angela was prescribed a huge cocktail of drugs every day for her stress. She took pain medication–hydrocodone. She took other drugs for anxiety.  Things got worse. She lost a child. She took way more drugs than she was supposed to. She had suicidal thoughts. She considered taking all her pills and ending the pain once and for all. She couldn’t sleep. She was haunted. How many Americans and Canadians have been led down this path to drug dependence? How many Americans and Canadians have died as a result? In one year more Americans died from drug over doses than died in the entire Vietnam War! Since that happened in the United States, it has happened again!

 

Dr. Gupta believes that all this chronic stress, the pain which comes with the stress, and the desire to make that pain go away have combined to create a toxic brew that is destroying America and Canada. Many take medications even when they know it could take their lives.

This is dangerous stuff.

Chronic Stress

Decline of the west, Health

 

As Dr. Sanjay Gupta pointed out, in his CNN special, One Nation Under Stress,  in the United States, the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World,  “we are 4.7% of the world’s population and take 80 to 90% of the world’s OxyContin and hydrocodone. And I’m pretty sure that we don’t have 80-90% of the world’s pain.” How could this happen in the richest country in the world?

Another thing is that epidemic of drugs is mostly affecting whites aged 35 to 55. Stress should be listed as a contributing cause to many deaths. Why whites? Why so much stress in the richest country in the world?

Stress of course is a natural phenomenon.  As Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist from Stanford University said,

 “When you look at the stress hormones we secrete exactly the same chemicals as a lizard and a fish and a bird. This is ancient, ancient biology. For 99% of the beasts out there what stress is about is 3 minutes of some screaming crisis when somebody is very intent on eating you or you are very intent on eating somebody, and everything your body does at that time makes perfect sense. You increase your heart rate, your blood pressure, your breathing rate, you turn off everything that is not essential and you shut down growth, tissue repair. When a lion is chasing you and you are running for your life and one of the things you are doing is all sorts of metabolic stuff to divert energy to your thigh muscles. Oh my god you think you only have 3 months until your taxes are due and you divert energy to your thigh muscles. That makes no sense whatsoever and that’s where you pay the price.”

 

Robert Sapolsky who wrote a book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers points out that when a lion is chasing a zebra it needs stress to get away. Stress is entirely good in that situation. Yet once the zebra gets away the stress level returns to normal. That also happens quite quickly. Life is good again. The zebra relaxes. The stress was entirely good.  It saved the zebra’s lie.

As Dr. Gupta said, “Stress is not the enemy. It’s the constant never-ending toxic stress–that’s the stress that’ll kill you.” Chronic stress in other words is what we should be stressed out about. Sapolsky says he has learned a lot about stress from the baboon world. What he learned is,

“What makes psychological stress really corrosive is lack of control, lack of predictability, lack of social support. You might say insecurity is the problem. If you are chronically stressed you will chronically increase your blood pressure and you are going to get more liquid turbulence into your blood vessels and hit the walls. They pound the walls and they cause microscopic bits of scarring, tearing, and inflammation there. And you get plaques and you get the whole cascade there. It’s a fairly straight biological line from chronic stress to your blood pressure that is chronically elevated. It’s a much more indirect route to liver sclerosis.”

 

 

Sapolsky was convinced that stress is the common cause of liver sclerosis, suicides, and opioid overdose.  They are all related. Stress is the root problem, he is convinced. “Our lives are more psychologically corroded by stress. Stress: am I valued? Stress: do I have a meaningful place in the community? Stress: is there even a community I can rely upon. Stress: why am I here?”

Note all these questions point to social issues. This is what chronic stress is all about.

Psychopaths and Sociopaths raising children

Abuse of Power, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Usually, Father Doughty took a boy to his room at Kuper Island Indian Residential School, but occasionally, often under the influence of alcohol, he would just jump into bed with a boy in the dorm and have sex with him while the other children were listening. But the boys all stayed silent about the abuse. As Duncan McCue the CBC host of the podcast series said, “for many the abuse and silence carried on for years, bottled up, ravaging their hearts, minds, and souls.”

These were the “fathers” that were raising indigenous children in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools because the government thought it would be unwise to let them be raised by their savage parents.

For years, after he was an adult, James Charley, one of Doughty’s victims, said, “My wife had to clean up the mess.” That, of course, is a very common occurrence. The children who are abused later abuse others, including the ones they love the most. This is what they learned in  residential school. This is how the problems are rolled down the generations. Religious leaders taught this to them. Victims of abuse later lashed out at other vulnerable people. They didn’t learn to be good parents. They learned to be abusers. This is the hideous legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.

As one member of the community said, it is a community in which “Psychopaths and Sociopaths raise children and that has everything to do with missing and murdered children.”

The effects of the abuse truly do cascade through the generations. It is never fair for us to suggest to the victims, or even the next generation,  that they “should just get over it,” as I have heard more than once. It really is an ignorant and unbecoming comment to make.

 

Oblates were Holy Men

Abuse of Power, Exploitation, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

I want to warn people this post contains some difficult details of abuse at Kuper Island Indian Residential School. I don’t want to emphasize the sexual abuse because the abuse at such schools went so much farther than that. But these issues should not be avoided either.

Brother Glenn Doughty was a young Oblate at the school who had been taught (indoctrinated?) to sacrifice himself to God. He would not pursue wealth. But there were things he would pursue—with determination. Doughty was stuck on a remote island where there was little he could do except look after a bunch of kids. Yet Doughty thrived there.

The Oblates at the school were tough. They dominated the children. Now that was not uncommon in schools at the time.  I also attended schools in Steinbach at about the same time  where the teacher tried to dominate the children, but the domination in our schools was on an entirely different plane than Kuper Island.

The Oblates ate relatively lavish meals, at least compared to the less than modest fare of the children. This special treatment for Oblates was of course justified, the brothers universally felt, on account of the sacrifices they made for God. They “deserved” lavish meals.  So at least they thought. As Duncan McCue of the CBC said, “they had a strong sense of entitlement.” That is not uncommon for religious leaders of young children.

One day Brother Doughty told Tony Charley, one of the students, that he would be getting his own room. Charley thought this was a special privilege. That wasn’t quite right. In Tony’s first week in the dorm after he stopped being a day student and became a dorm resident, he was invited into Doughty’s room. Doughty told Tony “We should get to know each other.”

When it was time to sleep Doughty told Tony to sleep with him. “he grabbed me inside my pyjamas and started to rub my penis. Then he grabbed my hand and put it over his penis, so I did the same thing. It was very shocking to have that happen.”

Father Doughty was friendly with many boys in the dorm often inviting them to his room for the night for what he called “magic tricks.” Tony encountered Brother Doughty regularly. Tony did not know what to do. He wondered, “This is a holy man. Why is he doing this?” He could not understand it. At the time Tony knew little about sex. There certainly was no sex education in the Catholic school. The abuse lasted from September of 1967 to December of 1967. After that Tony exercised an act of resistance.  Tony moved to the upper bunk bed, and Doughty stopped coming. But of course, he moved on to other boys in the dormitory including Tony’s younger brother James. There are always more victims available in a residential school. There was an endless supply of vulnerable children far away from protection.

That is of course heaven for sexual predators. And hell for the victims.

In the hands of the Oblates

Abuse of Power, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

What was it like to be a student at one of the most notorious residential schools in Canada? One episode of the CBC documentary on Kuper Island told the story of two very young indigenous brothers James and Tony Charley who shared their accounts of multiple incidents of sexual abuse at the residential school on Kuper Island and in particular abuse they suffered at the hands of a young Oblate who was the chaperone for more than 30 young boys as part of a special trip to Expo 67 in Montreal.  This was brother Doughty.

This incident came as a bit of a shock for me. I was also at Expo 67 that summer as part of a trip I made with 4 friends on a mad adventure to Montreal. For us it was a joyous experience.  For the young indigenous boys, it was not all idyllic. Far from it in fact. They were in the hands of brother Dooughty.

The Oblates are an order of Catholic missionaries who ran nearly 50 residential schools in Canada including Kuper Island Indian Residential School. The order was founded in the 19th century with a mission to evangelize the poor. This missionary spirit was important. Most teachers at residential schools had degrees, but their wages according to Duncan McCue, the CBC the host of the podcast,   were “Piddling wages.” Why did they come to such schools to teach? What was it that attracted them there? Perhaps it was a steady supply of vulnerable children.

Survivors James and Tony Charley shared stories of horrendous sexual abuse at the hands of members of the Oblate at Kuper Island Residential School who they trusted absolutely as a representative of God.  They had been taught that everything the Oblates did was in the service of God. Even if it seemed strange these were men of God who should be considered spiritual leaders.

This spiritual element of the abuse added a cruel existential element to their experience.  Their stories showed in the words of Duncan McCue  “The abuse poisoned every aspect of their life at the school, even things that were supposed to be fun.” Or things that were supposed to be sacred.  It doesn’t get much worse than this.

Each child had different experiences in those schools. Some experiences were much worse than others. Some survivors testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that their experiences were positive. But those were rare. And very few if any were spared.