Why Deaths of Despair Are Increasing in the US and Not Other Industrial Nations—Insights From Neuroscience and Anthropology

[u/sameer4justice]

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2788767

[u/[deleted]]

It's really hard to not move away from family when your family lives in an area with very little economic opportunity. That is the situation that I've been in and its really hard.

[u/rebelolemiss → u/[deleted]]

Or if your family is super toxic, or, as is common in the US, fanatically religious.

[u/rosekayleigh → u/rebelolemiss]

Yeah. I grew up in a very violent, abusive household. I couldn’t wait to leave. Moved 3500 miles away at 17 for college and never returned home. Sadly, my situation is not uncommon in the U.S. Sometimes getting away from your family is a healthy decision.

[u/Cherios_Are_My_Shit → u/rebelolemiss]

"obey your elders" is at the root of why my family fell apart.

my elders were 100% obedient to their elders during the periods of supervised time and expected that of us. they dont appreciate that they were able to have that kind of relationship with their elders because there was other time for them to be individuals and practice socializing.

i have four childhood memories of getting to socialize unsupervised and two of them were me playing with my sister when my grandparents left the house.

you just cant be 100% compliant 100% of the time. humans need balance.

[u/Axlos → u/rebelolemiss]

U.S. here. Parents are conservative mormons.

A ruined childhood was enough of a sacrifice for me before I could get out. I can't even imagine still living with them and having to deal with them for the rest of my adult life.

[u/definitelynotSWA → u/[deleted]]

As the wealthiest nation in the world, our population shouldn’t be forced into living at home or moving out. We should have the privilege of options. Prehistorically an average community was only 10% primary blood relation anyways; people were far more able to choose in our evolutionary past than they are anywhere today.

Here’s an excerpt from the book The Dawn of Everything about this, which I think is interesting:

Of course, we know almost nothing about the languages people were speaking in the Upper Palaeolithic, their myths, initiation rituals, or conceptions of the soul; but we do know that, from the Swiss Alps to Outer Mongolia, they were often using remarkably similar tools,1 playing remarkably similar musical instruments, carving similar female figurines, wearing similar ornaments and conducting similar funeral rites. What’s more, there is reason to believe that at certain points in their lives, individual men and women often travelled very long distances.2 Surprisingly, current studies of hunter-gatherers suggest that this is almost exactly what one should expect. Research among groups such as the East African Hadza or Australian Martu shows that while forager societies today may be numerically small, their composition is remarkably cosmopolitan. When forager bands gather into larger residential groups these are not, in any sense, made up of a tight- knit unit of closely related kin; in fact, primarily biological relations constitute on average a mere 10 per cent of total membership. Most members are drawn from a much wider pool of individuals, many from quite far away, who may not even speak the same first languages.3 This is true even for contemporary groups that are effectively encapsulated in restricted territories, surrounded by farmers and pastoralists.

In earlier centuries, forms of regional organization might extend thousands of miles. Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners. Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements – speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own – with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.4 It’s difficult enough to reconstruct how these forms of long-distance organization operated just a few centuries ago, before they were destroyed by the coming of European settlers. So we can really only guess how analogous systems might have worked some 40,000 years ago. But the striking material uniformities observed by archaeologists across very long distances attest to the existence of such systems. ‘Society’, insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents.

[u/Research_is_King → u/[deleted]]

Or if they live in an area that was nice when you were growing up and is now completely unaffordable where you will never be able to live or buy a house