Politically, we’re at each other’s throats. The economy is in deep transition, as the impact of the pandemic continues to define what might statistically appear as a full recovery, but once you look under the macro numbers, to the daily challenges facing ordinary Americans, it’s not so rosy. Stuff clearly costs more; the wage explosion seems to have passed and the job market is clearly less robust as it was very recently. Areas of concentrated climate change deniers – as in the South’s tropical storm alley – are being hit hard by the flooding that is a direct result of climate change. These natural disasters, accelerated in the West by explosive wildfires, have challenged property insurability within the most climate-sensitive areas. Not to mention the declining life expectancy of average Americans. And in an interview with soon-to-be former President Joe Biden noted, watching the new Harris-Walz rising tide, he is anything but optimistic in the prospect of a presidential transition should Donald Trump lose.
A lot of really negative reality as a conservative judicial juggernaut combined with a powerful MAGA push to take us back to the less-than-stable 1950s. So, is there a reset anywhere else in our land, perhaps even on a global basis? Are there more cracks and schisms in American values, expectancies and quality of life that are not so obviously and widely reported? This is where a huge elephant has squeezed into an already crowed room. For many, hope has left the building. Yes, upward mobility has pretty much been relegated to the history books.
Old folks who have paid off their homes and have decent pensions or retirement savings are breathing a sigh of relief, but unless wealthy, for most of the rest, these are hardly positive and stable times. The rest of us will not live remotely at or above the quality of life enjoyed by our parents. Plus, there is more debt in the system than is actually healthy and viable… from credit cards, to mortgages to student loans.
The answer is all around us. The number of Americans struggling with mental illness or near-mental-illness issues has doubled over what we had less than a decade ago. Social media seems to have accelerated mental stress among younger Americans as well. Ellen Barry, writing for August 8th New York Times news feed, The Morning, looks our new reality: “It is no mystery why rates of anxiety and depression in the United States climbed in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. But then life began a slow return to normal. Why haven’t rates of distress returned to normal, too?... Self-reported anxiety and depression have declined from the peak they reached in November 2020, when 42.6 percent of adults said they had symptoms, according to the Household Pulse Survey, a Census Bureau tool that measures well-being. Since then, that figure has declined to 20.7 percent. That’s still double the 11 percent of Americans who said the same thing before the pandemic.
“The share of young adults reporting anxiety and depression had been rising for about a decade before Covid struck. That continued throughout the pandemic — and did not ease as quickly when vaccines became available… This is likely because their symptoms were tied to problems other than the virus, like economic precarity, the housing crisis, social isolation and political turmoil, said Emma Adam, a psychologist at Northwestern. ‘There’s so many things affecting adolescents and young adults that are about uncertainty with their future,’ Adam said. ‘And that hasn’t changed.’
“Age, of course, tracks with income. Adam’s team found that people between the ages of 18 and 39 were half as likely to live in their own home as their counterparts over 40. That means they were especially vulnerable to inflation, rent increases and job loss — just as they faced big decisions like whether to have children or own a home.
“But it wasn’t just about the economy. Researchers at Johns Hopkins found measurable declines in mood after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that abolished the federal right to abortion. Women in states where abortion bans took effect had reported more anxiety and depression compared with counterparts in other states. There was no such difference for men.
“Even though politics, law and the economy affect everyone, the young may pay more attention to social conditions, said Ludmila Nunes, who tracks research for the American Psychological Association. So they are both more exposed to the consequences and more aware of them. ‘These events affect them more than older people,’ Nunes said. ‘So it’s normal that they are going to respond more.’…
“[It’s different for middle-aged and elderly Americans:] While older people show declines in attention and memory, they seem to gain more control over their emotions. Some research suggests that older people learn to focus more on positive memories — or what one team of psychologists called ‘emotionally gratifying memory distortion’ regarding the past.
“Researchers at Boston College set out to test this hypothesis by surveying people between the ages of 18 and 80 about their memories from the early part of the pandemic. They found something paradoxical: The older their subjects were, the more positive memories they had of the pandemic, even though they were physically more at risk. This puts young people at a disadvantage when facing traumatic events. And if their stress was driven by economic and political uncertainty, rather than fear of illness, then there is no reason to expect it to recede.
“Adam said her best guess is that older Americans would continue to recover faster than younger ones. ‘We can’t answer the fundamental question’ of when, and if, Americans’ moods will return to a prepandemic norm, ‘except to predict very strongly that the age disparities will still be there,’ she said.”
But some of the reasons are obvious. Older Americans are more likely to have their economic world in order and will not have to face the most horrific consequences of a failure to contain and reverse climate change. Healthcare is a national issue, but for those on Medicare, the consequences of medical coverage as considerably less severe, even as advances in treatments for a growing number of ailments are growing fast. Oddly and in addition to their perception of the pandemic, older people also have a marked tendency to remember the entire past in most favorable terms, minimizing events like the turmoil of the civil rights transitions or the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Many look at the nasty transition from Trump to Biden as blip in an otherwise functional democracy. Unlike so many younger Americans, they believe that there is no risk of losing our form of government and that some “balance” needs to be restored anyway.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I sincerely hope that this mental health reset currently in a vastly more threatening reality will subside, find more stability and settle into an acceptable level of normalcy… and that humanity redefines acceptance and coping.
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