4 ms·
You're looking at the symptom rather than the disease. The despair is the disease. Drug and alcohol use are from people self-medicating their symptoms. If any
by notadoc 7y ago
You're looking at the symptom rather than the disease.
The despair is the disease. Drug and alcohol use are from people self-medicating their symptoms.
If anyone cared to address this problem, they'd look at what causes despair. That despair is often from economic and social distress.
Instead, everyone is outraged up on a media and politically driven moral panic about pharmaceutical medication that happens to be rarely abused and is almost never addictive (fewer than 0.1% chance of becoming addicted to prescribed painkillers, study on over 640,000 patients, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27400458 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27400458).
- whiddershins 7y agoNo, drug and alcohol addiction definitely can produce despair. Causation can and does work both ways in this one, causing a spiral which is almost impossible to trace back to a single thing. No, I don’t think economic problems per se cause despair. People are richer, much richer, than 100 or 1000 years ago. I don’t think that changes the fundamental human struggle with meaning, hope, purpose, and everything else that wards off despair.
- harimau777 7y agoI think that part of the problem may be that people are richer in ways that don't make them happy or give them meaning, and poorer in ways that do. Most notably, it seems to me that owning your own house and land would bring a much greater sense of autonomy, accomplishment, control, etc. than more consumeristic things like TVs, video games, fancy food, etc. (not that its bad that those things exist).
- mjevans 7y agoI agree the problems should be fixed, but it's a serious enough problem that both the symptoms __and__ the underlying causes need to be addressed. Just working on one or the other isn't going to resolve the issue.