The Syndrome so toxic we can’t even say it
It’s no news that our environment affects our health and life, but as larger swaths of the world break into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, the differences are becoming more distinct and quantifiable. The whole cycle of poverty is being examined as a syndrome of symptoms. In England, they’ve even coined a name for it… “shit life syndrome”.
From the article “The bad news is we’re dying early in Britain – and it’s all down to ‘shit-life syndrome’”-
“Britain and America are in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis. They are experiencing not merely a slowdown in life expectancy, which in many other rich countries is continuing to lengthen, but the start of an alarming increase in death rates across all our populations, men and women alike. We are needlessly allowing our people to die early.
In Britain, life expectancy, which increased steadily for a century, slowed dramatically between 2010 and 2016. The rate of increase dropped by 90% for women and 76% for men, to 82.8 years and 79.1 years respectively. Now, death rates among older people have so much increased over the last two years – with expectations that this will continue – that two major insurance companies, Aviva and Legal and General, are releasing hundreds of millions of pounds they had been holding as reserves to pay annuities to pay to shareholders instead. Society, once again, affecting the citadels of high finance.
Trends in the US are more serious and foretell what is likely to happen in Britain without an urgent change in course. Death rates of people in midlife (between 25 and 64) are increasing across the racial and ethnic divide. It has long been known that the mortality rates of midlife American black and Hispanic people have been worse than the non-Hispanic white population, but last week the British Medical Journal published an important study re-examining the trends for all racial groups between 1999 and 2016…
…Shit-life syndrome is not just a feature of a US city such as Baltimore, where the difference in life expectancy between the richer and poorer districts is as much as 20 years, it’s a feature of our cities, too. Within the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the difference in life expectancy between richest and poorest is 16 years. And the trends are deteriorating. Public Health England has published a hair-raising map of the English health experience from 2014 to 2016. The East and West Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside, the north-west and north-east experienced declines in life expectancy. Nobody should have been surprised they voted against the status quo in the Brexit referendum.”
Suicides and overdoses among factors fueling drop in U.S. life expectancy by Melissa Healy in the Los Angeles Times, Nov 2019
Shit Life Syndrome: Mental Health and Capitalist Decay by Alice McIntyre in Cooper Point Journal, Mar 2020
What is sh*t life syndrome? Sally Baker on Working On The Body
Can care integration cure ‘shitty life syndrome’? by Blair McPherson in HSJ- For HealthCare Leaders, Aug 2019
“Shit-Life Syndrome,” Trump Voters, and Clueless Dems, by Bruce Levine on CounterPunch, Jan 2020
The bad news is we’re dying early in Britain – and it’s all down to ‘shit-life syndrome’, by Will Hutton in The Guardian, Aug 2018
